Celebrating U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson (LISTEN) – Good Black News
by Lori Lakin Hutcherson (@lakinhutcherson)
Today’s GBN Daily Drop podcast is a bonus episode about U.S Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, whose historic appointment this week can’t be celebrated enough.
To read about her, read on. To hear about her, press PLAY:
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Hey, this Lori Lakin Hutcherson, founder and editor in chief of goodblacknews.org, here to share with you a bonus daily drop of Good Black News for Saturday, April 9th, 2022, based on the format of the “A Year of Good Black News Page-A-Day Calendar” published by Workman Publishing.
Just two short days ago, history that was a long time in coming was finally made when Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson was officially confirmed by a Senate vote of 53 to 47 to become the 116th Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court and first African American woman ever to serve on the highest judicial body of the nation.
In a bit of poetry, the vote was called for and presided over by Vice President Kamala Harris, who herself is quite familiar with making U.S. history as a Black woman.
Nominated by President Joe Biden in February, Justice Jackson faced over a month of scrutiny in the Senate confirmation hearings as well as in the media, but navigated it all with intelligence, grace and candor.
Associate Justice Jackson was born September 14, 1970 in Washington DC and grew up in Miami, Florida. Her parents, Ellery Brown and Johnny Brown, attended segregated primary schools, then attended historically black colleges and universities.
Both started their careers as public school teachers and became leaders and administrators in the Miami-Dade Public School System. When Justice Jackson was in preschool, her father attended law school.
In a 2017 lecture, Justice Jackson traced her love of the law back to sitting next to her father in their apartment as he tackled his law school homework—reading cases and preparing for Socratic questioning—while she undertook her preschool homework—coloring books.
Justice Jackson stood out as a high achiever throughout her childhood. She was a speech and debate star who was elected “mayor” of Palmetto Junior High and student body president of Miami Palmetto Senior High School.
But Justice Jackson still faced naysayers. When she told her high school guidance counselor she wanted to attend Harvard, the counselor actually told Jackson she should not set her “sights so high.”
That did not stop Justice Jackson. She graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University, then attended Harvard Law School, where she graduated cum laude and was an editor of the Harvard Law Review.
Jackson went on to clerk for the U.S. Supreme Court under Justice Stephen Breyer, and then work as a public defender. In 2012, she was nominated by President Barack Obama to be a U.S. District Court Judge for the District of Columbia and then appointed with bipartisan support in 2013.
In 2021, the same occurred when President Biden nominated Jackson to be a Judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals in DC, and she was appointed with bipartisan support.
Jackson will be the first federal public defender to sit on the court, and the first justice since Thurgood Marshall to have represented criminal defendants.
Jackson will be sworn into the Supreme Court after Justice Breyer retires this summer, and to hear a small bit from KBJ herself:
“I can only hope that my life and career, my love of this country and the Constitution will inspire future generations of Americans.” – Ketanji Brown Jackson
To learn more about Justice Jackson, watch the CBS Sunday Morning feature on her on YouTube and check out the links to more sources provided in today’s show notes and the episode’s full transcript posted on goodblacknews.org.
This has been a bonus daily drop of Good Black News, based on the format of the “A Year of Good Black News Page-A-Day Calendar for 2022,” published by Workman Publishing. Beats provided by freebeats.io and produced by White Hot.
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