Excerpted quotes from interviews with Judges Robert Carter and Constance Baker Motley.

Carter: I was always aware of racial prejudice. I grew up in Newark, N.J., where I was treated very well in grade school. If I acted up, the teachers would notify my mother. But we then moved to East Orange, where blacks were not treated well. Our high school had a swimming pool, but blacks could not use it during gym class. White students had to pass a swimming proficiency test to graduate, unless they had a doctor’s excuse. But blacks did not get any swimming test. We could use the pool only on alternate weekends, after Friday. After we used the pool, they drained all the water out so it would be fresh on Monday for the white kids to use. They wouldn’t want any of the black to get on the white kids. That was about 1933.

Motley: I realize that there are some people who feel the civil rights movement has run its course, but they were removed from the struggle. The average black person would not think that we are at the end of the struggle to gain black equality. Nor are we at the end as far as the central-city struggle is concerned, and the segregation in schools in cities like New York, where 80 percent of the schools are black and Hispanic majority. That arises from the fact that the black middle class, like the white middle class, has moved out of the city and into the suburbs. What you have left in the city are poor, working-class blacks and mothers on relief and their children. The white population in the schools is relatively small. The children in many schools are not getting standard education because there is no middle class. The teachers have to water down the curriculum, so to speak, because the children come from homes where there are no books, homes where no one is reading to them the way the middle-class children get read to. It perpetuates itself.

Carter: I handled cases in Mississippi and South Carolina. But I guess I never approached a case with trepidation.

Motley: I think women have made more progress than blacks, white women particularly. And black women also have advanced because in many black families it was the black women who got to go to college if there was money enough. Families figured black males always could get jobs in construction. That’s why you have so many more black women with college degrees than black men. That disparity has lessened as the black middle class has expanded.

Carter: I would have to say I’ve enjoyed my careers as a civil rights lawyer and as a judge equally. Sitting on the bench, I was able to make a difference. I was able to fight discrimination. I was able to save some black kids, just by virtue of the fact that I understood them. I realized they were not bad kids. I certainly would like to be remembered as a judge who made a difference.

Motley: When I was appointed, I became the first black woman to be a federal judge. At the time, there were only four other women in the country who were federal judges. Now, of course, there are many more.