Daily Inspiration Quote by Constance Baker Motley

A sentence that reads like a dry fact check lands, in Motley’s hands, as an indictment. “The last state” is the kind of phrasing used for trivial rankings and sports standings; she repurposes it to shame a political culture that treated higher education like a whites-only inheritance. By naming South Carolina, she refuses the soft-focus language of “the South” or “the times.” The target is specific, and so is the accountability.

Motley’s intent is strategic. As a civil rights lawyer and later a judge, she understood that numbers and firsts and lasts can cut through denial faster than moral pleading. The line doesn’t argue that segregation was wrong in the abstract; it shows how long a government was willing to spend money, deploy courts, and risk social chaos to keep one Black student out of one institution. That compressed “college level” matters too: not schools in general, but the gateway to professional life, credentialing, and political power. Segregation wasn’t only about lunch counters; it was about controlling who gets to become the people who run things.

The subtext is that “admission” was never merely administrative. It required federal pressure, lawsuits, and personal bravery from students who became symbols by force. South Carolina’s “last” status signals not just backwardness but deliberate resistance after the moral and legal tide had turned. Motley frames delay itself as a form of violence: years stolen, ambitions narrowed, a state choosing prestige and stubbornness over equal citizenship.