Constance Baker Motley's Quotes

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

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.

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

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

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

Too many whites still see blacks as a group apart.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.