Politics & Power Quote by Constance Baker Motley

A blunt inventory hides inside that calm phrase "spent the major part of the 20th Century". Motley turns time into a receipt: not a metaphorical struggle, but decades paid out in court briefs, boycotts, funerals, and legislative trench work. The line refuses the comforting American storyline where racism is a regrettable chapter that naturally closes. If African Americans "spent" the century battling it, then racism is not an accident of the past; it is the organizing condition that shaped politics, housing, education, labor, and law for a hundred years.

The intent is strategic. Motley, a civil rights lawyer who helped crack open Jim Crow and later became a federal judge, speaks from inside the machinery of reform. She isn't offering uplift; she's establishing a factual baseline against amnesia. The subtext is a warning against premature victory laps. The Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act didn't end the fight; they merely changed its terrain from overt segregation to subtler forms of exclusion and backlash.

Her use of "We" matters. It's collective, not confessional, binding personal biography to communal history. It also implies an audience that needs reminding: policymakers, moderate allies, and institutions eager to declare the problem solved. By framing the century as "battling racism", Motley highlights the grotesque asymmetry: an entire population forced to invest generational energy simply to reach the starting line. The sentence is a quiet indictment of a nation that treated equality as an extracurricular project rather than a founding obligation.