To Be Equal: The loss of Motley and Wilson

Marc H. Morial

Two giants of the American scene are dead, and the world is the poorer for it.

The reason the deaths of Constance Baker Motley, the civil rights legend, former political officeholder and longtime federal judge, and August Wilson, certainly one of the leading playwrights of the modern American theater, are being so keenly felt is because their contributions to America and the world were so immense.

In one sense, Constance Baker Motley and August Wilson made their mark in two different fields:

Hers was the fact-based world of civil rights activism, political leadership, and legal reality, legal theory and legal practicality.

His was his own brilliantly-conceived world of fiction that was based on a particular black neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, his boyhood home.

But if one looks at their lives and work from a different angle — through the prism of race and American society — then one sees profound commonalities.

First, it must be said, both their lives underscore the dramatic changes that swept over American society in their lifetimes.

Constance Baker Motley was 84 at her death, 24 years senior to August Wilson; but the United States of America both came of age in was largely the same. That is, it was a society laced with a vicious inequality, one in which in societal terms the content of the individual character of black Americans (and other Americans of color) counted for nothing.

“If you’re black, get back” was the ruling principle of American society in the decades before the 1960s.

Yet, by the time August Wilson was born in 1945, when Constance Baker Motley entered her last year at Columbia Law School, the winds of racial change that we now know as the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s were just about to reach gale force.

Those gales would be stoked mightily by the shrewd maneuvering of the legal arm of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.

Constance Baker Motley, who joined the NAACP as a teenager, signed on with LDF while still in law school and soon became one of its most brilliant and courageous practitioners. The latter quality was also a fundamental requirement for LDF work, given that most of its legal cases had to be tried in the South.

The cases she was involved in, from the landmark Brown desegregation case to voting-rights cases to attempts to integrate the state universities of Alabama, Georgia and Mississippi themselves mark America’s arduous climb to becoming a democracy in fact not just rhetoric.

As legal rights were secured, Constance Baker Motley was called on to serve America in other capacities: as the first black woman state senator in New York, as the first women to be Borough President of Manhattan at a time when the borough presidencies of New York City exercised considerable sway in the city’s governance, and, by President Lyndon Johnson’s appointment in 1966, as America’s first black woman federal judge.

August Wilson worked a different side of the street, as one of the characters in his rich, ten-part cycle of plays rooted in Pittsburgh’s Hill District might say.

His was a world where the raw material of reality was refined by an extraordinarily inventive imagination, a keenly-observant intellect, a dead-on ear for both music and speech, a sense of humor that was by turns sly and subtle and bawdy, a righteous, relentless sense of anger about racial injustice, and, above all, a commitment to the history and traditions of black people in America.

His larger artistic agenda, he said during a speech in 1991, was “answering [the African American novelist, essayist and civil rights activist] James Baldwin when he called for a ‘profound articulation of the black tradition,’ which he defined as ‘that field of manners and ritual of intercourse that will sustain a man once he’s left his father’s house.’”

As individuals, Constance Baker Motley and August Wilson embodied the profound tradition within Black America of the pursuit of excellence — what the writer Albert Murray referred to as the indelible “ancestral imperative to do something and become something and be somebody.”

It was America’s great fortune that they married that individual drive to African Americans’ pursuit of their rightful place in the American past, present and future — a pursuit that not only helped restore the reality of who African Americans were and are, but has also redeemed the American experience itself.

Marc H. Morial is the president National Urban League.