Constance Baker Motley was the ninth of 12 children born in New Haven, Conn to a woman who was the founder for the New Haven NAACP and a father who was a chef for the Skull and Bones student organization at Yale in 1921.  Her parents, Rachel Baker and father Willoughby Alva Baker had immigrated from Nevis in the Caribbean.  When Constance Baker Motley was 15 years old, she was denied entrance to a public beach because she was black.  This incident would catapult a string of life accomplishments that would include getting a law degree from Columbia University School of Law in 1946.

Clarence Blakeslee, a local philanthropist helped her financially attend initially the historically black college Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee before she decided to return north and attend New York University where she would get a Bachelors of Arts Degree in Economics in 1943.  In her lifetime she would become, an African American civil rights activist, lawyer, judge, state senator and President of Manhattan, New York City. In the 1954, one of her first defeats would be the destruction of segregation in public places where she would have the pleasure of legally not having another African American turned away for another public beach.

Constance Baker-Motley started her career as a legal clerk at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund aka LDF.  There she worked with a respected group of civil rights attorneys. One of those attorneys would be the future U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice, Thurgood Marshall and Jewish-American civil-rights advocate Jack Greenberg. She was LDF's first female attorney and became Associate Counsel to the LDF.  This position entitled her to being lead trial attorney in various early and significant civil rights cases, one of the m being Brown v Board of Education.

Motley was the first African-American woman ever to argue a case before the U.S. Supreme Court, in Meredith v. Fair in which she won the effort of James Meredith to be the first black student to attend the University of Mississippi in 1962.  During her tenure as a trial attorney for civil rights, she won 9 out of 10 cases argued before the Supreme Court. Nevertheless, the tenth decision, regarding jury composition was actually later overturned; therefore, she never lost a case.

CB Motley would later become the first African American woman elected to the New York State Senate, the first African American woman in 1965 to be in the position of Manhattan Borough President and one year later, she would become named by Lyndon Johnson as a district judge for the United States District Court Southern District of New York.  That appointment made her the first African American woman federal court judge, a position she held until her death on September 28, 2005.  Even more, during that reign, she served as chief judge.  Ms. Constance Baker-Motley was inducted into National Women's Hall of Fame in 1993 and still almost a decade later, awarded the Presidential Citizens Medal by President Bill Clinton.

According to an MSNBC story, In her autobiography, “Equal Justice Under Law,” Motley said defeat never entered her mind. “We all believed that our time had come and that we had to go forward.” At the time of her demise, Ms. Baker-Motley was in the process of working on cases. She left behind a husband and a son at the age of 84.

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