Quotes By Constance Baker Motley

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

I soon found law school an unmitigated bore.

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

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

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

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

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