Just five women and two African Americans, both men, are among the 115 people who have served on the United States’ highest court over more than two centuries. Both of those numbers may change in 2022, with President Joe Biden’s nomination of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, a 51-year-old Washington, D.C., native raised in Miami, to replace retiring Justice Stephen Breyer.

Jackson’s rise is, in part, due to the work of those women and Black men – and to Black women judges dating back almost a century.

These early trailblazers remain noteworthy because even decades after their careers, relatively few Black women are judges at the state or federal level.

A promise fulfilled

During his campaign for the presidency, Biden had promised to nominate a Black woman if an opening arose on the Supreme Court.

Jackson, his pick, graduated from Harvard University and its law school and completed two clerkships in federal courts before clerking for Breyer in 1999. Later, she worked in private practice and as a federal public defender. She was also a member of the United States Sentencing Commission, which makes recommendations for the sentences federal judges should hand out for particular crimes.

In 2013, she was confirmed to the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, where she served until 2021. In that year, she was appointed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, often viewed as the nation’s second-highest court because it handles many cases relating to federal law and constitutional interpretation. That has given her more judicial experience than four of the sitting members of the Supreme Court had before their confirmations – combined.

I have spent nearly 30 years teaching and studying Black women’s politics, African American politics and constitutional law. I know, and Jackson herself knows, that she stands on the shoulders of the handful of Black women who wore the black robes of a judge before her.

Read full story at The Conversation:
https://theconversation.com/ketanji-brown-jacksons-path-to-supreme-court-nomination-was-paved-by-trailblazing-black-women-judges-179728

Image Courtesy:
https://newsroom.ap.org/detail/SupremeCourtNomination/a0633c2b467b4988849057ccafec1a22/photo