On Tuesday, March 26, 2024, at 10:00 AM a special stamp dedication ceremony was held for Constance Baker Motley on the campus of Rutgers University Law School in Newark, New Jersey. Her stamp is the 47th in the Black Heritage Series that started in 1978 with a suggestion from the late ESPER board member Clarence L. Irving, Sr. 

     This event was held at Ruth Bader Ginsburg Hall during Women’s History Month.  The event was attended by over 200 people. Newark High School students were also in attendance. The students were part of Newark Public School’s Law & Public Safety Academy at University, Barringer and Central High Schools. The event was live-streamed with 100 people on.

     Della Walker Moses, ESPER’s New Jersey State Director was officiated this event. Constance Royster, Esq, the niece of Motley, was the featured speaker at the event.   She is a graduate of Rutgers Law school in 1977. The program’s invocation and benediction were given Rev. Dr. M. William Howard. Remarks were given by Susan Davis, Esq., Rutgers Law School Class of "81 and law clerk to Judge Motley and Dorothy E. Roberts, Esq., Professor of Law, Sociology and Civil Rights at the University of Pennsylvania and a former law clerk to the Judge.

      Judge Motley started her career in 1945 when she began working for the future U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall at the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Legal Defense and Education Fund (LDF). She would stay 20 years, rising to associate counsel, second from the top.

       While at the LDF she sued the University of Mississippi on behalf of James Meredith, who had been refused entrance, and the state of Mississippi on behalf of “Freedom Riders,” who had been jailed while testing the interstate transportation laws. She also represented Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., after he was arrested for marching in Birmingham, Alabama, in spring 1963. Motley worked on about 60 cases that reached the Supreme Court. She won nine of the 10 cases she argued before the Court.

       Motley and her colleagues often faced danger and disrespect as they challenged the entrenched racist system of the South. She also experienced sexism at a time when female lawyers were a rarity.

         In 1966, Motley was nominated by President Lyndon B. Johnson to a seat on the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York — the largest and busiest federal trial court in the country. Despite her nomination being held up for seven months by Sen. James Eastland, a strident segregationist from Mississippi, Motley was sworn in on Sept. 9, 1966 — the first African American woman on the federal bench. She rose to chief judge in 1982 and senior judge in 1986.  Motley was awarded the Presidential Citizens Medal in 2001 by President Bill Clinton. She died on Sept. 28, 2005.