Constance Baker Motley
I never thought I would live long enough to see the legal profession change to the extent it has.Collection: Legal
I grew up in a house where nobody had to tell me to go to school every day and do my homework.Collection: Teen
The legal difference between the sit-ins and the Freedom Riders was significant.Collection: Legal
I rejected the notion that my race or sex would bar my success in life.Collection: Success
King consciously steered away from legal claims and instead relied on civil disobedience.Collection: Legal
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.Collection: Legal
We African Americans have now spent the major part of the 20th Century battling racism.
When I was 15, I decided I wanted to be a lawyer. No one thought this was a good idea.
The women's rights movement of the 1970s had not yet emerged; except for Bella Abzug, I had no women supporters.
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.
Doing away with separate black colleges meets resistance from alumni and other blacks.
Lack of encouragement never deterred me. I was the kind of person who would not be put down.
I soon found law school an unmitigated bore.
We knew then what we know now; only exemplary blacks are acceptable.
There appears to be no limit as to how far the women's revolution will take us.
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.
The black population now consists of two distinct classes-the middle class and the poor.
The Constitution, as originally drawn, made no reference to the fact that all Americans wre considered equal members of society.
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.
Today's white majority is largely silent about the race question.
Whites would rather not be involved in race matters, I think.
When Thurgood Marshall became a lawyer, race relations in the United States were particularly bad.
We Americans entered a new phase in our history - the era of integration - in 1954.
Too many whites still see blacks as a group apart.
There is no longer a single common impediment to blacks emerging in this society.
The middle class, in the white population, encompasses a wide swath.
The last state to admit a black student to the college level was South Carolina.
The fact is that racism, despite all the doomsayers, has diminished.
Sexism, like racism, goes with us into the next century. I see class warfare as overshadowing both.
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.
My parents never told us that our great-grandmothers had been slaves.
My father kept his distance from working-class American blacks.
Living at the YMCA in Harlem dramatically broadened my view of the world.
In my view, I did not get to the federal bench because I was a woman.
I was born and raised in the oldest settled part of the nation and in an environment in which racism was officially mooted.
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.
How long must the American community afford special treatment to blacks?
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.
All Southern state colleges and universities are open to black students.
Affirmitive action is extremely complex because it appears in many different forms.
Something which we think is impossible now is not impossible in another decade.Collection: Inspirational
A Negro who does not vote is ungrateful to those who have already died in the fight for freedom. ... Any person who does not vote is failing to serve the cause of freedom - his own freedom, his people's freedom, and his country's freedom.Collection: Country
When I was 15, I decided I wanted to be a lawyer. No one thought this was a good ideaCollection: Ideas
When I went to law school, nobody heard of civil rights.Collection: School
We African Americans have now spent the major part of the 20th Century battling racismCollection: Racism
In my view, I did not get to the federal bench because I was a womanCollection: Views
The fact is that racism, despite all the doomsayers, has diminishedCollection: Racism
The last state to admit a black student to the college level was South CarolinaCollection: College