Constance Baker Motley

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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