Top 40 Constance Baker Motley Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— Constance Baker Motley

2. “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

3. “There appears to be no limit as to how far the women’s revolution will take us.”

— Constance Baker Motley

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

— Constance Baker Motley

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

— Constance Baker Motley

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

— Constance Baker Motley

7. “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

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

— Constance Baker Motley

9. “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

10. “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

11. “I soon found law school an unmitigated bore.”

— Constance Baker Motley

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

— Constance Baker Motley

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

— Constance Baker Motley

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

— Constance Baker Motley

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

— Constance Baker Motley

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

— Constance Baker Motley

17. “We African Americans have now spent the major part of the 20th Century battling racism.”

— Constance Baker Motley

18. “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

19. “How long must the American community afford special treatment to blacks?”

— Constance Baker Motley

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

— Constance Baker Motley

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

— Constance Baker Motley

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

— Constance Baker Motley

23. “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

24. “The last state to admit a black student to the college level was South Carolina.”

— Constance Baker Motley

25. “Today’s white majority is largely silent about the race question.”

— Constance Baker Motley

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

— Constance Baker Motley

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

— Constance Baker Motley

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

— Constance Baker Motley

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

— Constance Baker Motley

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

— Constance Baker Motley

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

— Constance Baker Motley

32. “By 1962, King had become, by the media’s reckoning, the new civil rights leader.”

— Constance Baker Motley

33. “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.”

— Constance Baker Motley

34. “There is no longer a single common impediment to blacks emerging in this society.”

— Constance Baker Motley

35. “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.”

— Constance Baker Motley

36. “The fact is that racism, despite all the doomsayers, has diminished.”

— Constance Baker Motley

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

— Constance Baker Motley

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

— Constance Baker Motley

39. “Too many whites still see blacks as a group apart.”

— Constance Baker Motley

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

— Constance Baker Motley

41. “We Americans entered a new phase in our history – the era of integration – in 1954.”

— Constance Baker Motley