Constance Baker Motley Quotes

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

We Americans entered a new phase in our history - the era of integration - in 1954.

I rejected the notion that my race or sex would bar my success in life.

The women's rights movement of the 1970s had not yet emerged; except for Bella Abzug, I had no women supporters.

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.

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

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

The legal difference between the sit-ins and the Freedom Riders was significant.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

There is no longer a single common impediment to blacks emerging in this society.

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

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

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

Affirmitive action is extremely complex because it appears in many different forms.

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

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

Too many whites still see blacks as a group apart.

All Southern state colleges and universities are open to black students.

I soon found law school an unmitigated bore.

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

We knew then what we know now; only exemplary blacks are acceptable.

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

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

When I was 15, I decided I wanted to be a lawyer. No one thought this was a good idea.

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

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.

My parents never told us that our great-grandmothers had been slaves.

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