Affirmitive action is extremely complex because it appears in many different forms.
After World War I, in New Haven there were quality schools, parks, and clinics. New Haven had its own beaches.
All Southern state colleges and universities are open to black students.
As a child growing up, I never understood that my father's maternal grandfather was white.
As another result to the Johnson landslide, the Democrats gained control of the New York State Senate for the first time in 30 years.
Both Ronald Reagan and George Bush were elected without black support during a period of white backlash against black gains.
Bush was trying to win an election, but at what price to American society?
By 1962, King had become, by the media's reckoning, the new civil rights leader.
Columbia Law School men were being drafted, and suddenly women who had done well in college were considered acceptable candidates for the vacant seats.
Doing away with separate black colleges meets resistance from alumni and other blacks.
During my early years on the bench, I stuck close to home, turning down every speaking engagement.
Growing up in New Haven, we had looked to Harlem as the Black Capital.
Had it not been for James Meredith, who was willing to risk his life, the University of Mississippi would still be all white.
How long must the American community afford special treatment to 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.
I grew up in a house where nobody had to tell me to go to school every day and do my homework.
I need no crystal ball to see that the newly emerged, educated, and greatly strengthened black middle class will provide the necessary energy and cooperation.
I never thought I would live long enough to see the legal profession change to the extent it has.
I rejected the notion that my race or sex would bar my success in life.
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 remember having the mumps and whooping cough when I was about 5 or 6. There was still the Indian medicine man.
I soon found law school an unmitigated bore.
I was born and raised in the oldest settled part of the nation and in an environment in which racism was officially mooted.
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.
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.
In my view, I did not get to the federal bench because I was a woman.
In this century, we have essentially repeated the gains and losses of the last. The next century promises more of the same.
In trying to figure out why my parents chose cold New Haven, I now realize the Caribbeans traded with New Englanders in the 18th and 19th Centuries.
It has been almost four centuries since Africans arrived in the New World. These Africans are believed to have been slaves, perhaps the first on our shores.
King consciously steered away from legal claims and instead relied on civil disobedience.
King thought he understood the white Southerner, having been born and reared in Georgia and trained a theologian.
Lack of encouragement never deterred me. I was the kind of person who would not be put down.
Living at the YMCA in Harlem dramatically broadened my view of the world.
Majoring in economics was the new status symbol, and most of my friends who were economics majors were white. We debated economics morning, noon, and night.
Many whites have been able to live out their lives without having any personal association with blacks.
Mississippi has only one law school. It appears this pattern will continue.
Most of the people my parents knew from the West Indies saw to it that their children went to school.
My father did not belong to any church group. He was a typical ladies' man.
My father kept his distance from working-class American blacks.
My father looked Hispanic or Mexican. He did not want to be known as a black American.
My father was a Republican all his life.
My mother early on had dropped, as best she could, her West Indian accent.
My only job after graduating from high school was a youth-opportunity job with one of New Haven's National Youth Administration projects.
My parents never told us that our great-grandmothers had been slaves.
My parents were not familiar with Negro spirituals.
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.
Of the women at Columbia while I was there, Bella Abzug became the most prominent, but others were also successful.
Our teachers were not overly concerned with the few students who were looking to go to college. There seemed no way for those who wanted to go to do so.
President Johnson nominated me to a federal judgeship.
Robert Kennedy submitted my name, without public announcement, to the White House for a seat on the federal district court in Manhattan.
Segregation in education was a social ill that involved a number of states and had existed for at least 60 years.
Sexism, like racism, goes with us into the next century. I see class warfare as overshadowing both.
State officials obviously found it incredible that any single black person in Mississippi would dare to challenge state policy by seeking admission to an all-white institution.
The black community has been deeply wounded by Bush's misguided calculation.
The black population now consists of two distinct classes-the middle class and the poor.
The challenges for me at NYU were great, given the diversity of courses offered and the size of the student population.
The Constitution, as originally drawn, made no reference to the fact that all Americans wre considered equal members of society.
The fact is that racism, despite all the doomsayers, has diminished.
The high court said that free Africans in American society had always been regarded as an inferior order of beings.
The influence of Yale was always visible in the black community. My high school was virtually on the Yale campus.
The last state to admit a black student to the college level was South Carolina.
The legal difference between the sit-ins and the Freedom Riders was significant.
The middle class, in the white population, encompasses a wide swath.
The women's rights movement of the 1970s had not yet emerged; except for Bella Abzug, I had no women supporters.
There appears to be no limit as to how far the women's revolution will take us.
There is no longer a single common impediment to blacks emerging in this society.
There were Indians living on reservations then in Connecticut. Others had long since intermarried with whites and blacks and lived in the cities.
Today's white majority is largely silent about the race question.
Too many whites still see blacks as a group apart.
Vicksburg is on the banks of the Mississippi River, the banks of which have been dedicated as a national memorial to the Battle of Vicksburg.
We African Americans have now spent the major part of the 20th Century battling racism.
We Americans entered a new phase in our history - the era of integration - in 1954.
We could not stay in the white hotel in Jackson or eat in any white restaurant.
We knew then what we know now; only exemplary blacks are acceptable.
When I was 15, I decided I wanted to be a lawyer. No one thought this was a good idea.
When I went to Fisk University in February 1941, I had my first experience with Jim Crow on the railroad.
When Thurgood Marshall became a lawyer, race relations in the United States were particularly bad.
Whites would rather not be involved in race matters, I think.
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