Ketanji Brown Jackson Stands on the Shoulders of Giants of Law

As Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson prepared to take center stage as President Joe Biden’s nominee to the United States Supreme Court, we learned a lot about her.

She came from a hard-working family where education was of supreme importance, but money was in short supply. She graduated from Harvard University and Harvard Law School, where she edited the law review. She clerked for Justice Stephen Breyer, whose seat she will fill in the summer of 2022. She built a distinguished previous career as a public defender, in private practice, and in the federal judiciary, particularly on the influential U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

Jackson is the first Black female Supreme Court Justice in American history. She is a much-loved daughter, wife, mother of her own two daughters, friend, and colleague. And her intellect, incisive judicial insights, and gracious personality have now inspired countless young people—Black, Brown, and White girls and boys—to make their own mark on our history.

And as we know from other milestones in African American history, Justice Jackson didn’t just emerge out of nowhere. She herself has noted on numerous occasions that she and her achievements stand on the shoulders of the many Black Americans of the past who fought for freedom, justice, and an equal place at the table—and sometimes paid with their lives. She has also paid tribute to the Black female judges who blazed the trail before her.

Judge Constance Baker Motley

Judge Constance Baker Motley was one of the intellectual architects of the Civil Rights era protests throughout the South, thanks to her work with the Legal Defense Fund of the NAACP from the mid-1940s through the mid-1960s. Mentored by Thurgood Marshall himself, she was nevertheless for many years the organization’s only Black female lawyer.

It was Motley who wrote the original legal complaint in the case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, which led to the landmark 1954 Supreme Court decision outlawing race-based segregation in schools. In 1961, she became the first Black women attorney to argue a case before the Supreme Court, and would win nine of the total 10 cases she argued in that venue. She became the first African American woman elected to the state senate in New York.

In 1966, Motley became the first Black female federal judge, and served on the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York for four decades—becoming chief judge in 1982—until her death in 2005.

Motley was born in 1921 in Connecticut, the daughter of working-class Caribbean immigrants. She did not herself experience racism until her late teens. On a train trip to Tennessee, she found herself humiliated by being forced into a segregated car.

She couldn’t afford higher education, but after she gave a stirring public speech, a White philanthropist was so impressed that he funded her studies. She went on to graduate from New York University and the Columbia University School of Law. The generosity that enabled her to do so always stayed with her, causing her to consistently take the side of compassion.

Despite her relative privilege compared to other Black Americans, Motley quickly learned her history, and would go on to put her life at risk as she entered one contentious and dangerous situation after another in pursuit of ending segregation. In perhaps her most famous win, she successfully argued in the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in 1962 on behalf of James Meredith’s admission to the segregated University of Mississippi. As Meredith exercised his right to register for classes, white rioters threatened the campus, and two people were killed.

Motley used her advocacy to uphold minorities’ right to peaceful protest, and became a close ally of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and of the martyred Medgar Evers. A frequent guest in the Evers’ home, she urged Evers to cut down the hedge that later provided cover for his assassin.

It was Motley who personally spearheaded the cases that led to integration at all-white universities, public parks, and public schools across the South.

It’s not only Motley who should occupy our thoughts as we reflect on the history that shaped Justice Jackson.

Judge Jane Bolin

Judge Jane Bolin (1908-2007) became the nation’s first-ever Black female judge at any level, serving from 1939 to 1978 as a New York City Domestic Relations Court judge. She worked closely with First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt on efforts to lower juvenile crime rates among young boys, and she challenged racist practices such as that requiring that people on probation only be supervised by probation officers of the same race.

 And as a family court judge, Bolin produced well-reasoned, thoughtful opinions upholding the rights of some of the most vulnerable people in society, particularly children. 

Judge Julia Cooper Mack

Judge Julia Cooper Mack (1920-2014) became the first African American woman judge to serve as a member of a court of last resort, when President Gerald Ford appointed her in 1975 to the District of Columbia Court of Appeals.

Her previous experience included work for the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which was instrumental in enforcement of anti-discrimination regulations. Mack’s notable rulings as a judge included a 1995 decision that permitted unmarried partners—regardless of their gender—to become adoptive parents. Two years later, she also ruled with the majority in favor of allowing children to file suit charging neglectful parents with negligence. 

Judge Amalya Lyle Kearse

Appointed by President Jimmy Carter as the first Black female federal appellate judge in 1979, Amalya Lyle Kearse (born 1937) continues to serve on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. She had become a partner in a Wall Street law firm in 1969, which was almost unheard of for an African American attorney in those days.

Kearse is perhaps best known for authoring the decision in the 1984 case of McCray v. Abrams, in which the appeals court limited the ways in which courts could use racially motivated discrimination in seating juries. Three presidents—Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Bill Clinton—went on to consider Kearse as a potential Supreme Court justice, making her the first to hold that distinction.