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.

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

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

In high school, I discovered myself. I was interested in race relations and the legal profession. I read about Lincoln and that he believed the law to be the most difficult of professions.

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

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

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

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

Too many whites still see blacks as a group apart.

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

Columbia Law School men were being drafted, and suddenly women who had done well in college were considered acceptable candidates for the vacant seats.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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