As Kamala Harris made history in her speech accepting the vice presidential nomination in 2020, she broke into a broad grin as she invoked the name of her hero: Constance Baker Motley, the first Black woman to serve as a federal judge.
Eighteen months later, Motley's memory was summoned again, this time by Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson upon her nomination to the Supreme Court.
The parallels are hardly coincidental. Motley, a path-breaking lawyer and jurist, is a natural inspiration to be shared by Harris, a former prosecutor who became the first Black and South Asian woman to be vice president and Brown, who is poised to be the first Black female justice of the nation's highest court. The ascension of both to their historic posts is a reflection of the outsize and enduring influence of Motley and a handful of fellow civil rights lawyers like Thurgood Marshall and Charles Hamilton Houston.
