Affirmitive action is extremely complex because it appears in many different forms.
- Constance Baker Motley Quote

All Southern state colleges and universities are open to black students.
- Constance Baker Motley Quote

By 1962, King had become, by the media's reckoning, the new civil rights leader.
- Constance Baker Motley Quote

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

Doing away with separate black colleges meets resistance from alumni and other blacks.
- Constance Baker Motley Quote

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

How long must the American community afford special treatment to blacks?
- Constance Baker Motley Quote

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.
- Constance Baker Motley Quote

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

I never thought I would live long enough to see the legal profession change to the extent it has.
- Constance Baker Motley Quote

I rejected the notion that my race or sex would bar my success in life.
- Constance Baker Motley Quote

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.
- Constance Baker Motley Quote

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.
- Constance Baker Motley Quote

In my view, I did not get to the federal bench because I was a woman.
- Constance Baker Motley Quote

King consciously steered away from legal claims and instead relied on civil disobedience.
- Constance Baker Motley Quote

King thought he understood the white Southerner, having been born and reared in Georgia and trained a theologian.
- Constance Baker Motley Quote

Living at the YMCA in Harlem dramatically broadened my view of the world.
- Constance Baker Motley Quote

My father kept his distance from working-class American blacks.
- Constance Baker Motley Quote

My parents never told us that our great-grandmothers had been slaves.
- Constance Baker Motley Quote

Sexism, like racism, goes with us into the next century. I see class warfare as overshadowing both.
- Constance Baker Motley Quote

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

The fact is that racism, despite all the doomsayers, has diminished.
- Constance Baker Motley Quote

The last state to admit a black student to the college level was South Carolina.
- Constance Baker Motley Quote

The legal difference between the sit-ins and the Freedom Riders was significant.
- Constance Baker Motley Quote

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

There appears to be no limit as to how far the women's revolution will take us.
- Constance Baker Motley Quote

There is no longer a single common impediment to blacks emerging in this society.
- Constance Baker Motley Quote

Too many whites still see blacks as a group apart.
- Constance Baker Motley Quote

We African Americans have now spent the major part of the 20th Century battling racism.
- Constance Baker Motley Quote

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

When I was 15, I decided I wanted to be a lawyer. No one thought this was a good idea.
- Constance Baker Motley Quote

When Thurgood Marshall became a lawyer, race relations in the United States were particularly bad.
- Constance Baker Motley Quote