Something which we think is impossible now is not impossible in another decade.
Lack of encouragement never deterred me. I was the kind of person who would not be put down.
A Negro who does not vote is ungrateful to those who have already died in the fight for freedom. ... Any person who does not vote is failing to serve the cause of freedom - his own freedom, his people's freedom, and his country's freedom.
There appears to be no limit as to how far the women's revolution will take us.
Sexism, like racism, goes with us into the next century. I see class warfare as overshadowing both.
When I was 15, I decided I wanted to be a lawyer. No one thought this was a good idea
When I went to law school, nobody heard of civil rights.
We African Americans have now spent the major part of the 20th Century battling racism
All Southern state colleges and universities are open to black students.
I never thought I would live long enough to see the legal profession change to the extent it has.
Too many whites still see blacks as a group apart.
Had it not been for James Meredith, who was willing to risk his life, the University of Mississippi would still be all white.
I grew up in a house where nobody had to tell me to go to school every day and do my homework.
Columbia Law School men were being drafted, and suddenly women who had done well in college were considered acceptable candidates for the vacant seats.
How long must the American community afford special treatment to blacks?
In my view, I did not get to the federal bench because I was a woman
When Thurgood Marshall became a lawyer, race relations in the United States were particularly bad.
The black population now consists of two distinct classes-the middle class and the poor.
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.
We Americans entered a new phase in our history - the era of integration - in 1954.
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.
The fact is that racism, despite all the doomsayers, has diminished
Whites would rather not be involved in race matters, I think.
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.
I was born and raised in the oldest settled part of the nation and in an environment in which racism was officially mooted.
