Constance Baker Motley quotes:

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Something which we think is impossible now is not impossible in another decade.

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

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.

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

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

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

I soon found law school an unmitigated bore.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Too many whites still see blacks as a group apart.

When I went to law school, nobody heard of civil rights.