The following is an alphabetized list of persons interviewed for the first series of Eyes On The Prize. Under each name is small biographical summary. Click on a name to watch their interview.

I • J • K • L • M

• Rutha Mae Jackson & Willie Hill Jackson

  • Rutha Mae Jackson, married to Willie Hill Jackson, lived near Greenwood, Mississippi during the murder of Emmett Till in 1955. Though she was not involved with the Till case, her family left town shortly afterwards. 
     
    Willie Hill Jackson, married to Rutha Mae Jackson, lived near Greenwood, Mississippi during the murder of Emmett Till in 1955. He was not involved with the case, but he recalls seeing Roy Bryant, one of the acquitted murderers, around town.

• Erle Johnston (1917-1995)

  • Erle Johnston, born on October 10, 1917, grew up in Grenada, Mississippi. After graduating from high school, Johnston became involved with a number of local newspapers, eventually working for the Jackson, Mississippi Clarion-Ledger. Later, Johnston served as publicity director for Ross Barnett’s failed campaign for Governor of Mississippi in 1955 and his successful attempt in 1959. In 1960, Barnett appointed Johnston as the Director of Public Relations for the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission. The Sovereignty Commission, established in 1956 under Governor James Coleman, used a variety of strategies to prevent integration and resist federal civil rights legislation and court rulings. The Commission also gave grants to the Citizens’ Council. Johnston, who attempted to counter his agency’s negative image, became the Commission’s executive director in 1963 and held the position until 1968. Johnston was working for the Commission and when the Supreme Court ruled the University of Mississippi (Ole Miss) must admit African-American James Meredith. Although Governor Barnett attempted to prevent Meredith from enrolling, the Kennedy administration pressured Barnett to accept the court’s ruling. Despite the presence of the National Guard and U.S. Marshals, rioting broke out on the Oxford, Mississippi campus, resulting in the death of two. Later, Johnston served as the mayor of Forest, Mississippi from 1981 to 1985. He published three books: I Rolled with Ross: A Political Portrait(1980), Mississippi's Defiant Years: 1953-1973 (1990), and Politics: Mississippi Style (1993). Johnston was co-chairman of Tougaloo College's Committee on the Preservation of Civil Rights Activities. He died on September 27, 1995.

• Curtis Jones (1938-2000)

  • Curtis Jones was one of Emmett Till’s cousins. Jones was visiting his grandfather Mose Wright in Money, Mississippi along with Till and cousin Wheeler Parker in August 1955. On August 24, Till and Jones snuck out of the church to go to Greenwood, Mississippi. There, according to Jones, the 14 year old Till entered a grocery store owned by Roy Bryant, bought candy, and said, “Bye, baby” to Carolyn Bryant, Roy’s wife. (The exact details of the exchange between Till and Bryant are disputed.) In the early hours of August 28, Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam kidnapped and murdered Till, mutilating his body and throwing him in the Tallahatchie River weighted by a cotton gin fan. After waking up that morning, Jones asked Wright if the men had returned Till. Jones soon called the sheriff and his family in Chicago. The trial of Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam in Sumner, Mississippi remains one of the most infamous moments of the early civil rights movement. After deliberating for only 67 minutes, the all-white jury acquitted Milam and Bryant of murder. Unable to face charges again because of Mississippi’s double jeopardy rules, Milam and Bryant later confessed the crime to William Bradford Huie in a Look Magazine article controversial because of Huie’s decision to pay the interviewees and a later FBI investigation that noted some inconsistencies in their account. The Emmett Till case was widely publicized by the black media and helped spark the growth of the civil rights movement in the late 50s.

• Donie Jones

  • Donie Jones lived in Montgomery, Alabama during the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955 and 1956. She was a participant in the boycott, and she attended some of the meetings held at Montgomery churches. 

• Nicholas Katzenbach (1922-2012)

  • Nicholas Katzenbach was born on January 17, 1922. A native of Philadelphia, he graduated from Phillips Exeter Academy, went on to Princeton University, and then to Yale Law School. In 1950 he began working as an attorney for Gildea and Rudner and acted as the attorney-advisor for the U.S. Air Force. Katzenbach was Assistant Attorney General of the Office of Legal Counsel from 1961 to 1962 and Deputy Attorney General from 1962 to 1965. On February 11, 1965, Lyndon Johnson selected Katzenbach as Attorney General of the United States and he remained in office until 1966. That same year, he became Secretary of State, a position he held until 1969.  While serving as Attorney General, Katzenbach was involved in drafting the Voting Rights Act. Katzenbach decided to step down from his position as Attorney General due to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover’s controversial unauthorized wiretaps of key civil rights figures including Martin Luther King. Katzenbach justified his decision to resign by asserting he “could no longer effectively serve as attorney general because of Mr. Hoover's obvious resentment of me."

• J. W. Kellum (1911-1996) and Amzie Moore

  • Joseph William Kellum was born in 1911. At age of 28, in 1939, Kellum passed Mississippi’s bar exam, despite not having gone to college. He was one of five defense attorneys for J.W. Milam and Ron Bryant in the Emmett Till trial of September 1955. Emmett Till, a 14-year-old from Chicago, had been kidnapped, murdered, and thrown in the Tallahatchie River a few days after flirting (though the exact events are disputed) with Carolyn Bryant, Roy Bryant’s wife, in Bryant’s grocery near Till’s great uncle’s house in Money, Mississippi. During the trial, Kellum famously told the jury that they were “absolutely the custodians of American civilization” and implored them to acquit Milam and Bryant. After deliberating for only 67 minutes, the all-white jury acquitted Milam and Bryant. Unable to face charges again because of Mississippi’s double jeopardy rules, Milam and Bryant later confessed the murder to William Bradford Huie in a Look Magazine article controversial because of Huie’s decision to pay the interviewees and a later FBI investigation that noted some inconsistencies in their account. The Emmett Till case was widely publicized by the black media and helped spark the growth of the civil rights movement in the late 50s. Kellum continued practicing law for many decades across the street from the Sumner courthouse where he defended Milam and Bryant. Kellum died in 1996.

• Coretta Scott King (1927-2006)

  • Coretta Scott was born on April 27, 1927 in Heiberger, Alabama. Having attended segregated schools, Scott graduated from Lincoln High School and enrolled to study music at Antioch College as one of the first black students. There, she became politically active and was a member of the local NAACP. Scott went on to study at the New England Conservatory of Music, where she met her future husband Martin Luther King, Jr., who was studying theology at Boston University. They married on June 18, 1953, moving to Montgomery, Alabama as soon as Scott King graduated. There, King began work as a minister at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. Scott King not only raised their four children but became an active and essential part of the civil rights movement of the 50s and 60s, often independent of her husband. Scott King assisted the Montgomery Improvement Association, of which King was president, and later the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Scott King fought for the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Continuing her musicianship, Scott King performed in the Freedom Concerts which benefitted the SCLC. Scott King attended the Disarmament Conference in Geneva in 1962 as a representative of the Women’s Strike for Peace. After her husband’s assassination on April 4, 1968, Scott King founded the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change and became an even more outspoken critic of injustice. Scott King was a participant in Poor People’s Campaign, her husband’s final major program of action. She published My Life with Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1969. Scott King allied herself with women’s rights, world peace, anti-apartheid, and, later, LGBT activists. She also dedicated herself to preserving her husband’s memory, leading many memorial marches and gatherings and advocating for the creation of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. The Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change has been expanded to become the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historical Site. Scott King died on January 30, 2006. 
     
    During the 1960s civil rights movement, Scott King handled many of the administrative tasks of her husband’s organizations and often accompanied him during his visits around the world. Scott King assisted her husband when he was unexpectedly selected as president of the Montgomery Improvement Association, which helped orchestrate the Montgomery Bus Boycott in 1955-6. She also assisted him during his tenure at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Scott King raised funds for the SCLC and occasionally gave speeches on King’s behalf or independently. Following her husband’s death, she worked tirelessly to preserve his memory and to continue his work.

• Reverend James Lawson (1928-)

  • The son of a Methodist minister, James Lawson was born in Pennsylvania in 1928. In 1947 he graduated from high school and also received his preacher’s license. While attending a Methodist college in Ohio, Lawson became involved with nonviolent student groups including the pacifist Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR). Lawson was drafted for the Korean War in 1951, but he refused to go. He spent thirteen months in prison because of this refusal. When he was released, he earned his B.A. and then went to Nagpur, India to serve as a campus minister at a college. During his time in India, Lawson became interested in the nonviolent teaching of Gandhi. He also stayed informed about the nonviolent efforts for civil rights in the United States. He returned to the United States in 1956, and in 1957 he enrolled in the Vanderbilt Divinity School. While in Nashville, he established a FOR office and began to teach students nonviolent methods of effecting change in their communities through sit-ins and other nonviolent methods. Nashville was a semi-segregated city, and Lawson sought to fully desegregate it through nonviolent demonstrations. He saw segregation as an immoral institution, and he believed that the United States would have to face this immorality and change its ways. After his work in Nashville, Lawson also helped organize the Freedom Rides in 1961 and the Meredith March in 1966. In 1968, while working as a minister in Memphis, Lawson helped organize the sanitation worker's strike. He invited Martin Luther King Jr. to aid the strikers in Memphis. King came and delivered his “Mountaintop” speech on April 3, 1968. A day later, King was assassinated while still in Memphis. In his later years, Lawson moved to Los Angeles and he remained an activist for a number of causes including the fight for immigrants’ rights as well as the movement opposed to the war in Iraq. 
     

• Marcia Webb Lecky

  • Marcia Webb Lecky was the secretary of the senior class at Central High in Little Rock, Arkansas during the 1957-58 academic school year. She was interviewed by Hampton to offer the perspective of a white student at Central High at the time of the Little Rock Nine’s integration of the school. In her interview, Lecky explains that the presence of black students had little effect on her senior year. The soldiers at the school did not bother her or the other students, and the school was so big that she rarely saw any of the nine black students. In her interview, she expresses some regret that she and other students did not reach out to the Little Rock Nine and make them feel more welcome at the school. 

• Rudolph Lee

  • Rudolph Lee was nine years old during the demonstrations in Birmingham in 1963. He witnessed mass meetings at the 16th Street Baptist Church, later bombed, as well as the brutal response to the protests in downtown Birmingham. 

• Frederick Leonard

  • Blackside producers interviewed a number of activists not found in the history books and who had never spoken publicly about their roles in the civil rights movement. One example is Fred Leonard, who participated in the 1961 Freedom Rides, attempting to integrate interstate busing in the south. Frederick Leonard was among the Freedom Riders attacked by an angry mob at a Montgomery, Alabama bus station in 1961. Leonard was not among those seriously injured. He was a freshman at Tennessee State University in Nashville at the time. The Freedom Rides were organized by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). The strategy of the rides was to have black and white passengers ride into the Deep South on interstate buses and challenge the segregation of the bus stations in the region. Segregation in interstate public offices had been outlawed by this time, but several states in the South were refusing to change. Leonard describes the dramatic events of that day. Several clips from Leonard’s interview appeared in the third episode of Eyes on the Prize and a number of the show’s producers rank the interview as one of the best conducted for the series.

• John Lewis 

• 1979 Interview | 1985 Interview
  • John Lewis was born in 1940 in Troy, Alabama. He received a B.A. in Religion and Philosophy at Fisk University. In addition, he graduated from the American Baptist Theological Seminary in Nashville, Tennessee. Early in his life, Lewis committed himself to the causes and concerns of the civil rights movement. Having attended segregated schools in Pike County, Alabama, he had been exposed first-hand to the reality of racial inequality. John Lewis was a vital personality and leader during the Nashville sit-ins at segregated lunch counters in the early 1960s. At age 23, Lewis delivered a keynote address at the March on Washington in 1963. As chairman of SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, he led some of the most perilous nonviolent protests in the movement, repeatedly putting his life at risk. He was arrested more than 40 times and severely injured several times. With close to 600 protestors, Lewis led crowds across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. After being told to cease walking by the Alabama State Troopers, the police attacked the peaceful protestors. His leadership on Bloody Sunday is partially responsible for President Johnson’s responsiveness to the civil rights movement. President Johnson submitted the Voting Rights Act of 1965 within days of the tragedy. Lewis joined Congress in 1986 as a representative for Georgia’s 5th Congressional District (Atlanta, GA) and has served as a much respected member since. He is now serving his sixth term in Congress. He currently lives with his wife in Atlanta.

• Rufus Lewis (1906-1999)

  • Rufus Lewis was born in 1906 in Montgomery, Alabama. He graduated from Fisk University in 1931 with an A.B. Degree in Business Administration. Lewis spent several years as a member of the faculty at Alabama State Teacher’s College and was particularly successful as an athletic coach. Lewis was always interested in black suffrage and was motivated to act when black soldiers returning from World War II were denied the right to vote. He led efforts in Alabama to educate black voters, preparing them for the “literacy tests” which they would be required to pass before registering. He was a leader in political and religious affairs. He founded several groups and organizations like the Montgomery Improvement Association, responsible for the famous Montgomery Bus Boycotts (1955-57) and the Alabama Democratic Conference. During the 1950s, Lewis worked closely with Dr. Martin Luther King and his church. He was elected to the Alabama House of Representatives in 1976 but left this office when President Jimmy Carter appointed him as a U.S Marshal. He died in 1999 at age 92.

• Leo Lillard

  • Kwame Leo Lillard was a student at Tennessee State University at the time of the sit-ins in Nashville in 1960. He was a Nashville native who eventually became a leader in the sit-ins and marches in his hometown. He saw the sit-in movement as something that the whole of Nashville had to embrace, not just the college students. He also assisted the Freedom Riders in 1961 by driving some of them back home from Birmingham after they were attacked at a bus station.

• Colonel Floyd Mann (1920-1996)

  • Colonel Floyd Mann was appointed the director of Alabama’s Department of Public Safety in 1959. At the time of the Freedom Rides, there was concern in Alabama that the riders would not be safe. Attorney General Robert Kennedy wanted the guarantee of Alabama Governor John Patterson that the riders would be protected. Colonel Mann offered to protect the riders if he was given the proper resources. With the understanding that the state and city police of Alabama would offer assistance, Mann went about protecting the riders. However, he soon learned that the Montgomery city police were going to take the day off when the riders went to Montgomery. Aware of this, he stationed one hundred state troopers outside of the city, ready to assist in case of an emergency. As expected, when the riders arrived in Montgomery their bus was attacked. There were no law enforcement officers present except for Mann, and he immediately called for the state troopers. However, before the troopers could get there, several riders were injured severely. Colonel Mann was forced to use his pistol to chase away the attackers and protect the riders. It is likely that if Mann had not been there to protect them, some of the riders, including William Barbee, Jim Zwerg, and Bernard Lafayette, would have been killed. When the state troopers arrived, the mob dispersed and order was restored.

• Burke Marshall (1922-2003)

  • Burke Marshall served as Assistant Attorney General in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division during the presidential administrations of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. During his tenure as assistant attorney general, Marshall was an aggressive advocate for racial equality and a key figure in the federal government's efforts to desegregate the South. He applied federal pressure to force the University of Mississippi to integrate in 1962 and eased tensions during the 1963 Birmingham Crisis. Marshall was also instrumental in the creation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibited discrimination in public accommodations.

• John McLaurin (1926-2004)

  • John McLaurin was born in 1926. He represented Rankin County as a Mississippi state senator and was a representative for Governor Ross Barnett during the controversy surrounding James Meredith’s admission to the University of Mississippi (Ole Miss). McLaurin was also a member of the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, established in 1956 under Governor James Coleman, which attempted to prevent integration and resist federal civil rights legislation and court rulings. McLaurin died in 2004.

• Reverend Orloff W. Miller (1931-2015)

  • Reverend Orloff Miller was raised in the Methodist church but became a Unitarian Universalist minister. He grew up in a segregated community in Ohio, but through his work as a Unitarian minister and his contact with the civil rights movement, came to believe in the need to stand up for equality for all people. Miller later lived in the San Francisco area and then Germany, where he served as the European Unitarian Universalists’ Minister-at-large Emeritus. 
     
    Reverend Orloff Miller first participated in the civil rights movement during the March on Washington. When Martin Luther King, Jr. issued a call from Selma for clergy to come and participate in a march after “Bloody Sunday,” Miller flew to Selma. In Selma, he participated in the “Turnaround Tuesday” march on March 9, 1965. Although he had intended to stay in Selma for only one day, he decided to stay longer at King’s request. That evening, Miller went to dinner with fellow Unitarian ministers James Reeb and Clark Olsen. After leaving the diner, they were attacked by white men with clubs. Reeb was hit on the head and died from his injuries in a Montgomery hospital. Miller attended Reeb’s funeral in Selma and participated in the last day of the march from Selma to Montgomery. 
     

• Walter Mondale (1928-)

  • Former Senator, Vice-President, and Ambassador Walter Frederick “Fritz” Mondale was born in Ceylon, Minnesota on January 5, 1928. Mondale first entered politics as an organizer for future vice-president Hubert Humphrey’s successful 1948 Senate campaign. Following a period of study at Macalester College and work in Washington, D.C., Mondale graduated from the University of Minnesota in 1951. Mondale served in the army before entering law school at the University of Minnesota. Governor Orville Freeman appointed Mondale as Minnesota attorney general in 1960, a position Mondale held for four years before being appointed to Vice-President-elect Hubert Humphrey’s vacant Senate seat in 1964. During his 12-year career in the Senate, Mondale was one of Congress’s most active liberals, supporting Johnson’s Great Society, brokering compromises that led to the Civil Rights Act of 1968, opposing the Vietnam War (disavowing his earlier support in 1968), chairing the Senate Select Committee on Equal Educational Opportunity and opposing Nixon’s anti-busing legislation, lowering the votes necessary for cloture from 66 to 60 (making legislation harder to filibuster), and serving on the Church Commission that investigated FBI and CIA abuses. In 1976, Jimmy Carter selected Walter Mondale as his vice-presidential running. Mondale instituted an activist model for the vice presidency that remains in place today, establishing an office in the West Wing and envisioning himself as an advisor and assistant to President Carter. Carter and Mondale, confronted with an economic recession and the Iranian hostage situation, lost re-election to Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush in 1980. In 1984, Mondale received the Democratic nomination for President and selected Representative Geraldine Ferraro of New York as his running mate. Ferraro was the first woman nominated for vice president by a major political party. Mondale fared poorly against Reagan, who won with nearly 59% of the popular vote and carried 49 states, the largest margin of victory since Franklin Roosevelt’s campaign against Alf Landon in 1936. Mondale returned to private law practice until President Bill Clinton appointed him as Ambassador to Japan in 1993, a position which he held until 1996. Mondale also served as Clinton’s special envoy to Indonesia in 1998. In 2002, Senator Paul Wellstone died in a plane crash, and Mondale agreed to run in his place in the upcoming election. He lost to Republican Norm Coleman. Mondale remained active as a private citizen, serving on the boards of various organizations and supporting the Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota. 
     
    In 1964, Mondale, as the chairman of a subcommittee of the Credentials Committee at the Democratic Convention, promoted a compromise that would have given the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party two at-large seats. The MFDP had journeyed to the Atlantic City convention to protest Mississippi’s racially segregated Democratic Party, and felt that the compromise was not enough. Though the compromise was rejected, new rules adopted at the convention as well as the Voting Rights Act of 1965 eventually resulted in more registered black voters and a more integrated Democratic Party. Mondale, supporting Hubert Humphrey’s bid for the presidency, attended the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, made infamous by race riots and the outrage of its attendees. Mondale was a prominent supporter of the Fair Housing Act, Section VIII of the Civil Rights Act of 1968, which prohibited discrimination in the sale, rental, or financing of houses and created the Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity in the Department of Housing and Urban Development as an enforcement agency. Mondale was a member of the Church Committee, which published reports to Congress on the abuses of power in the FBI’s COINTELPRO and CIA’s Project MKUltra. As the chair of the Senate Select Committee on Equal Edu cation Opportunity, Mondale opposed Nixon’s anti-busing legislation and supported bilingual education, magnet schools, and special education projects in an effort to combat poor education among citizens of impoverished and racially segregated areas. 
     

• Leola Montgomery

  • Wife of Oliver Brown and mother of Linda Brown, Leola Montgomery found herself in the middle of the Brown vs. Board of Education court case in 1950. In that year, her husband Oliver Brown was one of several plaintiffs in that famous court case that made segregation illegal. Oliver Brown was suing so that his daughter Linda Brown could attend an all-white school that was close to the Brown’s home in Topeka, Kansas.

• Amzie Moore (1911-1982)

  • Amzie Moore was born and raised in Mississippi. Moore’s family owned some land, inherited from his grandfather, but they struggled during the Great Depression and eventually lost the property. Moore’s mother died when he was fourteen, and he moved to Greenwood, Mississippi where he put himself through high school. Moore worked for the U. S. Post Office from 1935 to 1968 when he retired. During that time, he also opened a service station with a restaurant and a beauty parlor. He served in the U. S. Army for three and a half years in Burma during World War II. Moore was a community leader in Cleveland, Mississippi where he was president of the local NAACP and he encouraged voter registration efforts in the black community. Moore organized the local Head Start, beginning in 1966. He was also responsible for the building of many units of housing for low-income families in Cleveland. 
     
    As a president of the NAACP, Amzie Moore was peripherally involved in the Emmett Till murder trial. He also spearheaded voter registration drives in Mississippi and supported the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP). He brought Bob Moses to Mississippi and served as a host and guide for many other leaders of the civil rights movement working in Mississippi.

• Robert Moses (1935-)

  • A young leader in the civil rights movement, Robert Moses was a field secretary for the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the director of the Committee’s Mississippi Project. Moses was also one of the leaders of the 1964 Freedom Summer Project and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. A young leader in the civil rights movement, Robert Moses was a field secretary for the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the director of the Committee’s Mississippi Project. The Mississippi Project was an effort by SNCC volunteers to register African-American voters in the state of Mississippi. Mississippi was of strategic importance with only 6.7% of eligible African-Americans registered to vote in the early 1960s. Moses was an effective community builder and grass-roots organizer whose efforts united local African-American Civil Rights activists, SNCC field secretaries, and northern white volunteers. In 1962, Moses became co-director of the Council of Federated Organizations (COFO), a coalition of Civil Rights groups working in Mississippi. Moses is most well-known for his work in establishing the 1964 Freedom Summer Project. In this campaign, SNCC volunteers and local activists brought approximately 1,000 college students to Mississippi to both register African-American voters and form alternative “Freedom Schools”. The Project set up 41 schools and over 3,000 African-Americans attended classes. In addition to registering voters, the campaign hoped to bring national attention to the issue of racial inequality in the South. As Moses and other activists expected, many white residents in Mississippi resisted the Freedom Summer Project. While working in Mississippi, SNCC volunteers and potential African-American voters were frequently attacked by whites. Moses and others were often arrested and jailed for their efforts. During the 1964 Freedom Summer, more than 60 black churches, businesses, schools, and homes were bombed or burned. In June of that summer, three Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) workers investigating the burning of a black church were killed by Ku Klux Klan members. Moses was also actively involved in the formation of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP), an effort to challenge the legitimacy of the state’s all-white Democratic Party. The MFDP sought to replace the white Mississippi delegates at the 1964 Democratic Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey, arguing that these delegates represented only the state’s white establishment. MFDP members, according to Moses, “were bringing to this country and to the Democratic Party as its major political institution a question of generations of black people who had been denied political process and who were now asking that they get it.” Though the MFDP failed to replace the state’s white delegates, the incident sent a statement to national politicians that African-Americans demanded full voting rights and helped set the stage for the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

• Constance Baker Motley (1921-2005)

• 1985 Interview | 1986 Interview
  • A member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LD F) Constance Baker Motley was a leader in the legal struggle for civil rights. Motley worked on school desegregation cases in addition to cases dealing with equality in public transportation, housing, and public accommodations. Motley is well-known for her role in Meredith v. Fair where she successfully argued in front of the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals that James H. Meredith should be admitted to the University of Mississippi. In addition to being the first African-American woman to hold several political positions, Motley became the first black female to be appointed to the federal judiciary in 1966. 
     
    Motley was one of the first women to argue a case in front of the United States Supreme Court, winning nine of the ten cases she argued in front of the body. After graduating from law school in 1945, Motley became a legal assistant for the LDF. She eventually earned associate counsel status and became the LDF’s principal trial attorney. While at the LDF from 1945 to 1964, Motley worked with Thurgood Marshall and others on school desegregation cases throughout the South. Motley was involved in the Brown v. Board of Education case that outlawed public school segregation. One of the most famous cases Motley worked on was Meredith v. Fair where, in 1962, she successfully argued to the Fifth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals that James H. Meredith should be admitted to the University of Mississippi. In addition to school desegregation, Motley was an advocate for racial equality in housing, public accommodations, transportation, voting rights, and public accommodations. Judge Motley was also very active in politics. From 1964 to 1965, she served in the New York State Senate as its first African-American female senator. In 1965, she became the first African-American woman elected to the presidency of the Manhattan borough. In 1966, Motley was appointed by President Lyndon B. Johnson to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, the nation’s largest federal bench. This appointment made her the first African-American woman to be appointed to a federal judgeship. In 1982, Judge Motley was made the chief judge and, in 1986, she acquired senior status.

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