When she was 15, Constance Baker Motley was turned away from a public beach because she was black. It was only then--even though her mother was active in the NAACP--that the teenager really became interested in civil rights.

She went to law school and found herself fighting racism in landmark segregation cases including Brown v. Board of Education, the Central High School case in Arkansas and the case that let James Meredith enroll at the University of Mississippi.

Motley also broke barriers herself: She was the first black woman appointed to the federal bench, as well the first one elected to the New York state Senate.

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From 1961 to 1964, Motley won nine of 10 civil rights cases she argued before the Supreme Court.

"Judge Motley had the strength of a self-made star," federal Judge Kimba Wood said. "As she grew, she was unfailingly optimistic and positive--she never let herself be diverted from her goal of achieving civil rights, even though, as she developed as a lawyer, she faced almost constant condescension from our profession due to her being an African-American woman."

Motley, who spent two decades with the NAACP's Legal Defense and Educational Fund, started out there in 1945 as a law clerk to Thurgood Marshall, then its chief counsel and later a Supreme Court justice. In 1950, she prepared the draft complaint for what would become Brown v. Board of Education.