Quotes By Constance Baker Motley

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

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

I soon found law school an unmitigated bore.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

Too many whites still see blacks as a group apart.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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