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01/23/2019 06:30 AMMarta Daniels calls it one of Chester’s best kept secret, but Daniels is about to let more people in on it. The secret: the importance of the work of the late Constance Baker Motley.
There are, to be sure, people in Chester who remember Motley, who died in 2005 at the age of 84, but Daniels emphasized that even some of them don’t know the wide-ranging nature of Motley’s accomplishments.
“People in Chester knew Motley, but most of them had no idea of all the things she did,” Daniels said.
On Thursday, Feb. 21 at 6 p.m. at the Chester Meeting House, Daniels will give a PowerPoint presentation about Motley’s life and work. The event is a celebration not only of Motley’s accomplishments, but also of the fact that the property has been designated an official site on the Connecticut Freedom Trail.
Daniel’s presentation will be preceded by a chili dinner, a fundraiser to make improvements like a walking trail and educational brochures for visitors to the Motley site.
The Freedom Trail, opened in 1996, recognizes locations important to civil rights and African American history within the state. In all there are 135 locations listed.
According to State Architectural Historian Todd Levine, many of the trail sites are associated with freedom and slavery, but Motley’s is notable on multiple levels.
“Constance Baker Motley was a strong woman making a statement for women and African Americans,” he said.
Motley, who was born in New Haven, was a lawyer, a politician, and a judge. She worked with Thurgood Marshall as a pioneering woman member of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund in critical cases like Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark 1954 Supreme Court decision that declared separate but equal schools for black and white students to be unconstitutional. She served as Manhattan Borough president and was the first black woman to be elected to the New York State Senate. In 1966 President Lyndon Johnson appointed her a federal judge, the first black woman to sit on the federal bench. She served nearly 40 years until her death from heart disease.
Motley made groundbreaking decisions on everything from women’s rights to Wall Street insider trading but gained a measure of even more widespread recognition for her 1978 decision that allowed a female sports reporter go into New York Yankees locker room to interview for stories just as her male colleagues could.
“They called her the baseball judge,” Daniels said.
Motley and her husband purchased their property in Chester in 1965 as a weekend retreat and owned both a home on Cedar Lake Road and an additional acreage on the other side of the road for some 40 years. In 2016, the Chester Land Trust was able to purchase the 6.7 acres across from the house from Motley’s estate. At that time, they created the Judge Constance Baker Motley Preserve, dedicated in June 2017.
Land trust volunteers cleared the property, created a parking area and a picnic table, and created the kiosk that now stands on the property detailing Motley’s life and accomplishments.
The Motley home, land trust board member Jenny Kitsen explained, was not a part of the property bought by the group, but the State of Connecticut Historic Preservation Office wanted also to recognize the house, directly across the street from the preserve. As a result, the present owners of the home were invited to have it listed as a heritage site along with the Motley Preserve.
“They were delighted to be asked and accepted. There will be two plaques, one for the preserve and one for the home, which will say privately owned with no access,” Kitsen noted.
She added that The Freedom Trail has several homes that cannot be visited, but still have plaques.
According to Daniels, the proximity of the Motley property to Camp Hazen YMCA, named for state Senator Edward Hazen who founded the camp in 1920, may well have been important to the judge. One of Senator Hazen’s silent business partners was Clarence Blakeslee, the New Haven philanthropist who paid for Motley to go both to college and Columbia Law school.
Blakeslee was impressed when he heard Motley, then a high school student, speak. Motley was the 9th of 12 children of immigrants from the Caribbean. Her father worked as a cook at Yale; her mother as a seamstress. Without Blakeslee’s assistance, funding Motley’s education would not have been possible.
Creating the local Judge Constance Baker Motley Preserve didn’t mean that the property, despite Motley’s achievements, would automatically be included on the Connecticut Freedom Trail. The Chester Land Trust had to assemble a portfolio of more than 100 pages with the necessary supporting information to be considered. The application, submitted last September, included not only an essay detailing Judge Motley’s contributions to the movement for civil rights and human dignity, but also her particular relationship to the town of Chester, as well as aerial and topographical maps of the site.
The Motleys’ only child, Joel Motley III, said he was very proud the inclusion of the property once held by his family on the Connecticut Freedom Trail and said his mother would have been, too.
“Everything in Connecticut was special to her,” he said. “She was a New Haven girl.”
Chester Land Trust will hold a program celebrating Constance Baker Motley and the inclusion of the Judge Constance Baker Motley Preserve and Home on the Connecticut Freedom Trail on Thursday, Feb. 21 (snow date Thursday, Feb. 28) at 6 p.m. at the Chester Meeting House, 4 Liberty St, Chester. Tickets for the chili dinner are available at chesterlandtrust.org and at the door.