Virtual Event: Tomiko Brown-Nagin

Harvard Book Store's virtual event series welcomes TOMIKO BROWN-NAGIN—acclaimed legal historian and Dean of Harvard University's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study—for a discussion of her latest book, Civil Rights Queen: Constance Baker Motley and the Struggle for Equality. She will be joined in conversation by colleague and fellow legal scholar RANDALL KENNEDY, author of Say It Loud!: On Race, Law, History, and Culture. 

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About Civil Rights Queen

Born to an aspirational blue-collar family during the Great Depression, Constance Baker Motley was expected to find herself a good career as a hair dresser. Instead, she became the first black woman to argue a case in front of the Supreme Court, the first of ten she would eventually argue. The only black woman member in the legal team at the NAACP’s Inc. Fund at the time, she defended Martin Luther King in Birmingham, helped to argue in Brown vs. The Board of Education, and played a critical role in vanquishing Jim Crow laws throughout the South. She was the first black woman elected to the state Senate in New York, the first woman elected Manhattan Borough President, and the first black woman appointed to the federal judiciary.

Civil Rights Queen captures the story of a remarkable American life, a figure who remade law and inspired the imaginations of African Americans across the country. Burnished with an extraordinary wealth of research, award-winning, esteemed Civil Rights and legal historian and dean of the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, Tomiko Brown-Nagin brings Motley to life in these pages. Brown-Nagin compels us to ponder some of our most timeless and urgent questions—how do the historically marginalized access the corridors of power? What is the price of the ticket? How does access to power shape individuals committed to social justice? In Civil Rights Queen, she dramatically fills out the picture of some of the most profound judicial and societal change made in twentieth-century America.

Praise for Civil Rights Queen

“Rigorously researched and elegantly written, Civil Rights Queen is a seminal biography of an extraordinary figure whose legacy has been obscured for far too long. Brown-Nagin powerfully illuminates Motley’s journey into the heart of American law and politics, and the result is a magisterial work that befits its subject.” —Ibram X. Kendi, bestselling author of How to Be an Antiracist

“Now, at last, in Civil Rights Queen, the brilliant historian and legal scholar, Tomiko Brown-Nagin has given Constance Motley’s life and heroic achievements the attention they deserve. It’s difficult for me to imagine a biography we’ve needed more. Civil Rights Queen restores a truly brave, courageous, and brilliant lawyer and jurist to her proper place in American history.” —Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University

“Civil Rights Queen is a brilliant work, elegantly written and deeply researched.  Brown-Nagin does complete justice to the life of Constance Baker Motley, one of the Twentieth Century’s towering figures.” —Annette Gordon-Reed