ACS Summer Reading List Book Talk: Civil Rights Queen

Please join the American Constitution Society for a conversation with the author of Civil Rights Queen: Constance Baker Motley and the Struggle for Equality, Tomiko Brown-Nagin, Dean of Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University; Daniel P.S. Paul Professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard Law School; and Professor of History at Harvard University. The author will be in conversation with Christina Beeler, Voting Rights Staff Attorney at the Texas Civil Rights Project; ACS Next Generation Leader; former ACS Board Member 2017-2019.

About Civil Rights Queen:

Born to an aspirational blue-collar family during the Great Depression, Constance Baker Motley was expected to find herself a good career as a hair dresser. Instead, she became the first black woman to argue a case in front of the Supreme Court, the first of ten she would eventually argue. The only black woman member in the legal team at the NAACP's Inc. Fund at the time, she defended Martin Luther King in Birmingham, helped to argue in Brown vs. The Board of Education, and played a critical role in vanquishing Jim Crow laws throughout the South. She was the first black woman elected to the state Senate in New York, the first woman elected Manhattan Borough President, and the first black woman appointed to the federal judiciary.

Civil Rights Queen captures the story of a remarkable American life, a figure who remade law and inspired the imaginations of African Americans across the country.

You can purchase Civil Rights Queen here or at your local bookseller.