Equal Justice Under Law.

Constance Baker Motley Farrar, Straus and Giroux 19 Union Square West New York, NY10003 282 pp., $25

For those of us past a certain age, who can remember racial segregation not only in the Deep South but even in the nation's capital, who can remember the "Help Wanted--White" columns in the Washington Post and lynchings south of the Mason-Dixon line, there can never be nostalgia for the era before Brown v. Board of Education.

The horror of those times and the courage of the mostly African American lawyers who brought the suits that broke the back of Jim Crow are re-created in this inspiring autobiography of the only woman who was a full member of the legal team that fought and won those cases.

Constance Baker Motley, the daughter of immigrants from the Caribbean island of Nevis, was born and grew up in Connecticut. Unable to afford college after finishing high school in 1939, she became a community activist and president of the New Haven Negro Youth Council. A fiery speech at a youth council meeting, attacking racial discrimination in the local job market and white control of organizations supposedly dedicated to betterment of the lot of black citizens, brought her to the attention of Yankee industrialist Clarence Blakeslee.

He so admired her independence that he paid her way through both Fisk College and Columbia Law School, from which she graduated near the top of her class in 1946. Blakeslee invested in the future, and he got a good return on his money.

This is a lawyer's book, and as one might expect, the story really comes to life with the author's graduation from law school. Motley declined an offer from a Wall Street firm and chose instead to become an associate of Thurgood Marshall at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.

For the next two decades, she was immersed in virtually all the legendary cases that continued the revolution in race relations begun by the Civil War.

She helped integrate the University of Texas law school with Sweatt v. Painter in 1950, worked with Marshall on the two landmark Brown cases, integrated the University of Florida law school in Hawkins v. Board of Control, and brought similar cases in Louisiana and Alabama.

She fought Gov. Orval Faubus in the infamous Little Rock public school cases and represented Charlayne Hunter (Gault) in integrating the University of Georgia. She risked her life representing James Meredith in the successful assault on racial segregation at the last bastion of southern racism, the University of Mississippi.

Motley handled the Freedom Rider cases and the sit-in cases and represented Martin Luther King Jr. and other leaders of nonviolent protest. She argued 10 cases before the U.S. Supreme Court, losing only one, and Justice William Douglas described her as one of the 10 finest appellate advocates he heard during his tenure on the Court.

This was not just great lawyering. Her life was frequently in danger. She was forced to endure the whole gamut of racist insults, ranging from the refusal of opposing lawyers to address her as "Mrs. Motley" in court to the refusal of judges to face her when she argued in federal appellate courts.

She persevered, of course, and she triumphed. Then, seeking new challenges, she became the first black woman elected to the New York State Senate and the first black woman president of the borough of Manhattan.

After a bitter Senate battle (Sen. James Eastland called her a communist), she became the first black woman on the federal bench, appointed by Lyndon Johnson to a seat on the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. One of the delightful photographs included in this volume is a group portrait of the court, a single black female face amid a sea of old white guys.

Motley became chief judge of that court, but her days since joining the judiciary have not entirely differed from her years in southern courts. She has been openly insulted by some fellow jurists, and the very mention of her name is said to have made a former chief judge of the Second Circuit stammer with rage.

Her record confounds the claims of her critics. She is accused of being biased, but her rulings prove she is not. She has been called incompetent, but her published opinions easily place her in the intellectual upper ranks of district court judges.

Is it that she is black? Obviously, that is a part of it. She and a second black district court judge, her NAACP Legal Defense Fund colleague Robert Carter, were alone in being publicly insulted by the judge at Second Circuit judicial conferences. Is it that she is a woman? Again, that is probably part of it.

Her autobiography provides the answer: She is unreconstructed. Page after page, Constance Baker Motley demonstrates that she is no more willing to bend the knee today than she was the day 50 years ago when Clarence Blakeslee heard her speak at the Q-House in New Haven. She tells us exactly what she thinks of the powerful men she has dealt with then and now, she tells us why she feels as she does, and she names names. She will not suck up to the mighty.

It took a tough woman to litigate the great cases that Constance Motley won. She was, and she is, the kind of lawyer we all hope to be.

John R. Williams practices law with Williams, Polan & Pattis in New Haven, Connecticut.