Quotes By Constance Baker Motley

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.