Printer Friendly Version - Stamp Honors Longtime Chester Resident

Chester’s Constance Baker Motley is being honored by the U.S.Postal Service with a stamp. The Motley stamp is the 47th in the post office’s Black Heritage series. Image courtesy of the U.S. Postal Service

Very soon, it will be possible to get a little bit of Chester anywhere in the United States, anywhere there is a fully stocked post office.

That is because the U.S. Postal Service has just issued a new stamp with a picture of the late U.S. District Judge Constance Baker Motley (1921-2005), who had a home with her husband Joel in Chester for some 40 years.

The Motley stamp is the 47th in the post office’s Black Heritage series, which includes notable Americans like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Jackie Robinson, Ella Fitzgerald, James Baldwin, and Motley’s mentor, Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall.

Beyond her time in Chester, Motley has another significant Connecticut connection: She grew up in New Haven and attended local public schools before graduating from New York University and Columbia Law School. She was the ninth of 12 children of immigrants from the Caribbean island of Nevis; her father worked as a chef at various Yale secret societies and her mother as a domestic worker.

Active in civic affairs even in high school, a New Haven businessman, Clarence W. Blakeslee, heard her speak and decided to pay for higher education.

Motley spent holidays, vacations, and weekends in the home in Chester. She and her husband also owned property across the street from their home.

That property, not the Motley house itself, was acquired by the Chester Land Trust in 2016. The land trust created the Constance Baker Motley Preserve, which includes a kiosk detailing her life and accomplishments.

The Motley home is privately owned, but there is a marker on it to indicate its historical significance.

In 2018, both the Motley Preserve and her home were listed on the Connecticut Freedom Trail, which celebrates African-American history in the state.

Chester resident Marta Daniels, who has researched Motley’s life and became particularly knowledgeable on her time in Chester, spearheaded the drive to turn the Motley property into a historic preserve.

“She really spent more time in Chester than she did anywhere else in her life. This was a place she loved,” Daniels said.

Daniels learned about the postal service’s plans for a Motley stamp when a researcher contacted her for any photographs she had had of Motley. The final stamp image is the post office’s design.

Daniels would like the stamp not to be simply a necessity for mailing letters but also an impetus for more people to learn about Motley. After law school, she worked for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the first woman to do so, drafting the original complaint for the landmark case Brown V. Board of Education. She spent the next 10 years arguing some 200 desegregation cases throughout the South.

Daniels said Thurgood Marshall, the head of the legal defense fund at the time and later a Supreme Court justice, thought a female black lawyer would appear less threatening in southern courtrooms and might thus achieve more impressive results.

Despite Motley’s significant work, Daniels points out that Parting the Waters, a Pulitzer-Prize-winning book on Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement, did not mention Motley at all.

Still, in a career of firsts, Motley was the first African-American woman to argue a case before the United States Supreme Court, the first African-American woman to sit in the New York State Senate, the first woman borough president of Manhattan, and the first black woman appointed a federal judge.

While on the federal bench, Motley made a landmark decision for feminism. In 1978, she ruled in favor of sports reporter Melissa Ludtke, who had sued Major League Baseball to gain admission to the New York Yankees locker room for post-game interviews, previously off-limits for female reporters.

The Chester Land Trust has recently added a hiking trail on the Motley preserve that honors another set of civil rights pioneers, the Little Rock Nine, who famously integrated Central High School in 1957 in the face of civil unrest by enraged local citizens.

The land trust has been planning a dedication ceremony for the new trail but has been foiled by the same thing that has foiled many outdoor activities this fall.

“It has rained every weekend,” Daniels noted at the time she was interviewed.