HLS Library Book Talk: Civil Rights Queen

Join the HLS Library on Tuesday February 8, 2022 at 12:30pm ET for a HLS Library Book Talk! This event features a discussion on Civil Rights Queen: Constance Baker Motley and the Struggle for Equality by HLS Professor and Dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study Tomiko Brown-Nagin and panelists HLS Professor Kenneth Mack and Georgetown Law Professor Sheryll Cashin. This event is free and will be recorded. Registration is required. If you, or an event participant, require disability-related accommodations, please contact Accessibility Services at [email protected].

More about the book from Pantheon:
“Born to an aspirational working-class family during the Great Depression, Constance Baker Motley was expected to make a career as a hairdresser. Instead, she earned a law degree and used it to transform American society.  The only woman member of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund’s legal team for many years, Motley helped litigate Brown v. Board of Education, defended Martin Luther King in Birmingham, and played a critical role in vanquishing Jim Crow laws in throughout the South…Motley was first woman elected borough president of Manhattan and the first black woman elected to the New York Senate. In a third act that capped off her career, the famed civil rights lawyer became the first black woman appointed to the federal judiciary. Burnished with an extraordinary wealth of research and an incisive examination of gender, race, and class, Civil Rights Queen tells the inspiring story of a remarkable American life and of a tumultuous period of social change.  Through this lens of Motley’s life, Tomiko Brown-Nagin asks us to ponder some of our most timeless and urgent questions: How do historically marginalized people access the corridors of power? How does access to power shape individuals committed to social justice? And, what is the price of the ticket?”

Book cover of Civil Rights Queen.
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