Constance Baker Motley Quotes

There has been only a civil rights movement, whose tone of voice was adapted to an audience of liberal whites.

As a result of America's efforts to realize the ideals of equality and freedom, blacks in America are now the freest and richest black people anywhere on the face of the earth including all of the nations that are ruled by blacks.

Ours has not been a racially democratic society for 300 years.

Our duty is to fight! Then we can adjust the problems that remain in the life of the colored man.

We are born with freedom and hope, but often that's dashed because of our color. But in school, I'd already been taught that no one could tell me that you can't do something because you're black.

The principal challenge of the next phase of the Negro revolution is to make certain that equality of results will now follow. If we do not, there will be no social peace in the United States for generations.

I think it's gonna take a sincere empathy and compassion for people of all races, to really reflect and process on the true history of the black community in this country. The history has been filled with incredible oppression and we really have to acknowledge that, to start to change the lens of how we see true equality.

The idea that America elected a black man to be its president forty years after it declined to allow Martin Luther King Jr. to stand on a balcony without getting shot still maintains its power to awe and inspire.

However, while we should certainly celebrate the demise of overt official racism, we must also critically examine where we are at this historical moment, recognize the many challenges ahead and reaffirm our commitment to making Brown v. Board a reality.

The tragedy of the civil rights movement is that just as it achieved the beginning of the end of racial segregation, white educated elites became swept up in the glamour of the sexual revolution.

Separate and unequal didn't work 100 years ago. It will not work today.

Startling, and alarming to many, is the conclusion that follows from these data that if all people were treated the same, most average race differences would not disappear.

I feel that there has been progress made since I was a boy on matters of race, but we have a long way to go.

I champion sensibly designed racial affirmative action, not because I have benefited from it personally - though I have. I support it because, on balance, it is conducive to the public good.

The MLK Shabbat Suppers focused on the theme of educational inequity, which Dr. King considered inextricably linked to the struggle for equality and justice.

I do not believe that the colour of one's skin determines whether you are disadvantaged.

Children are not simply commodities to be herded into line and trained for the jobs that white people who live in segregated neighborhoods have available.

Of course, the opposite of white privilege is not blackness, as many of us seemed to think then; the opposite of white privilege is working to dismantle that privilege. But my particular hip-hop generation proved to be very serious about figuring it all out and staying engaged.

It never occurred to me that I was not going to challenge segregation.

What worries me is that 'post-racial' America is not that different from the Americas that have preceded us, and it might not ever be.

I can't explain exactly why it lives within me for so long and passionately. But race matters to me; racial equality matters to me, as does gender. There is something about these kinds of social injustices that go to the deep of me.

I had always been interested in race and racial justice, but mostly it was with my nose pressed up against the glass, looking at the South from a long way away.

We don't want something for youth at risk, we want something for black youth at risk.

It is now time to mobilize, before it is too late, against the creeping legitimacy of racism in our society.

Opportunity seems to be color-coded here in America