Constance Baker Motley Quotes

Today's white majority is largely silent about the race question.

I remember being infuriated from the top of my head to the tip of my toes the first time a screen was put around Bob Carter and me on a train leaving Washington in the 1940s.

The middle class, in the white population, encompasses a wide swath.

Living at the YMCA in Harlem dramatically broadened my view of the world.

I got the chance to argue my first case in Supreme Court, a criminal case arising in Alabama that involved the right of a defendant to counsel at a critical stage in a capital case before a trial.

I never thought I would live long enough to see the legal profession change to the extent it has.

When I went to law school, nobody heard of civil rights.

By 1962, King had become, by the media's reckoning, the new civil rights leader.

Doing away with separate black colleges meets resistance from alumni and other blacks.

In high school, I won a prize for an essay on tuberculosis. When I got through writing the essay, I was sure I had the disease.

Whites would rather not be involved in race matters, I think.

The Constitution, as originally drawn, made no reference to the fact that all Americans wre considered equal members of society.

Something which we think is impossible now is not impossible in another decade.

Lack of encouragement never deterred me. I was the kind of person who would not be put down.

How long must the American community afford special treatment to blacks?

There appears to be no limit as to how far the women's revolution will take us.

The black population now consists of two distinct classes-the middle class and the poor.

When Thurgood Marshall became a lawyer, race relations in the United States were particularly bad.

My father kept his distance from working-class American blacks.

The fact is that racism, despite all the doomsayers, has diminished.

Sexism, like racism, goes with us into the next century. I see class warfare as overshadowing both.

We African Americans have now spent the major part of the 20th Century battling racism.

The last state to admit a black student to the college level was South Carolina.

I grew up in a house where nobody had to tell me to go to school every day and do my homework.

King thought he understood the white Southerner, having been born and reared in Georgia and trained a theologian.

I was born and raised in the oldest settled part of the nation and in an environment in which racism was officially mooted.

King consciously steered away from legal claims and instead relied on civil disobedience.

In my view, I did not get to the federal bench because I was a woman.

Had it not been for James Meredith, who was willing to risk his life, the University of Mississippi would still be all white.

New Orleans may well have been the most liberal Deep South city in 1954 because of its large Creole population, the influence of the French, and its cosmopolitan atmosphere.