Top 42 Quotes by Constance Baker Motley

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.

Too many whites still see blacks as a group apart.

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

I never thought I would live long enough to see the legal profession change to the extent it has.

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

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.

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

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

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

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