A major theme anchoring the life of Ketanji Brown Jackson is manifestation. Inspired by Schoolhouse Rock!, a cartoon that aired on ABC network and taught children math, science and civics, Justice Jackson wrote in Miami’s Palmetto High School’s yearbook that she wanted to be the first Supreme Court Judge to appear in a Broadway play.
Fighting for justice on Broadway is not a far-fetched dream, either. Just a few years before Justice Jackson was born in 1970, Doris Derby, John O’Neal and Gilbert Moses founded the Freedom Southern Theater, one of the cultural arms of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. It was a space where activists and actors performed plays that spoke to poor Mississippians during the 1964 Freedom Summer.
Justice Jackson has not appeared on Broadway yet, but she she’s tapped the musical part of that Broadway dream.
“I’m just a bill, I’m only a bill, and I’m sitting here on Capitol Hill,” sang Justice Jackson, theatrically referencing one of the popular songs from Schoolhouse Rock!, to a packed audience at Harlem’s Apollo Theater in New York City. It was one of the stops on her tour promoting the release of her new book, Lovely One: A Memoir, which follows her childhood in Miami to her 2022 nomination as an associate justice of the United States Supreme Court.
Speaking with news host Gayle King, Justice Jackson told the audience how her parents exposed her to the law. “My parents never spoke to me baby talk,” she recalled. “They talked to me in full sentences. Some of my earliest memories are of me sitting at the kitchen table; my dad has his law books, and he is studying…I have my coloring books and I am sitting with him, and I never thought that there was anything else that we were supposed to do but go to law school.”
Manifestation and hard work weren’t the only ingredients that stirred Justice Jackson’s success. In middle school, she was inspired by Constance Baker Motley, the first Black woman to argue a case before the Supreme Court and serve as a federal judge. “We share the same birthday (September 14). I remember having this interest in this fantastic woman, and I was thinking, ‘Why stop at law? I can be a federal judge,’” Justice Jackson shared with King.
Mississippi Senator James Eastland, a known segregationalist, purposely stalled Motley’s nomination, calling her a communist. Similarly, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, who attended Harvard with Justice Jackson, attempted to get her to share her thoughts on books that promoted anti-racism to infants and young children at Georgetown Day School, where she sits on the board of trustees. His line of questioning did not thwart her destiny.
At the event, King seemed to manifest a new dream for Justice Jackson when she slipped up and introduced her as “chief justice,” causing an uproar of applause and laughter in the room.
The interview concluded with Jackson reading a letter her daughter wrote to President Barack Obama when Justice Antonin Scalia died in 2016. Justice Jackson’s daughter, who was 11 years old at the time, asked Obama to consider her mother for Scalia’s replacement, writing that she is “determined, honest and never breaks a promise to anyone, even if there are other things she’d rather do.”
Lovely One: A Memoir is available on Amazon.
