Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson made a stop in Cleveland on Monday as part of a tour to promote her new memoir, “Lovely One.”
In a conversation with Michel Martin, host of NPR’s Morning Edition, the President Joe Biden-appointed justice spoke about her life and tenure on the U.S. Supreme Court.
She said the erosion of public trust in the Supreme Court, which the Annenberg Public Policy Center’s Constitution Day Survey found fell 22% between 2019 and 2022, is a “problem” for the court.
“The court, as an institution, really operates on public trust, unlike the other branches of government," Jackson said. "We don't have the army. We don't have... the power of the purse. All we have is the citizen's commitment to the rule of law and their trust and belief that the court is doing what it needs to do to promote the law. So whenever there is an erosion of public confidence, it's a problem.”
When asked if increasing polarization could be attributed to that distrust, Jackson acknowledged the growing divide but said one is not necessarily correlated to the other, pointing to history for a glimmer of hope.
“It's no secret that the court is deciding cases related to very contentious issues in the public. So to some extent, there's an overlap with respect to public attention on these issues and the things the court is doing," she said. "What history does is it shows us that we as a country and as citizens have been in tough times before — that we have been through very difficult and challenging environments. Whether it be polarization or... even issues with respect to people's perception of the courts... Perhaps we're in one of those cycles now, but history shows us that we are a strong country and that we persevere.”
The event, hosted by the City Club at Huntington Convention Center with more than 1,700 attendees, was focused heavily on Jackson’s life and journey to the Supreme Court, as chronicled in her recently released memoir. She said she began writing the memoir shortly after her confirmation hearing, a process which she called “arduous.”
“So much of who I am and who I have become is a result of my lived experience as an African-American in this country, is a result of the history of African-Americans in this country,” she said. “I felt like this was a good opportunity to tell my entire story. “
The Harvard Law School graduate attributed much of her interest in the law at a young age to the Black men and women who came before her, including her grandparents who lived in the segregated South and her parents, both educators who attended historically Black colleges and universities and moved to Washington D.C. in the late 1960s. Born in 1970, she said she was part of the first-generation post-Civil Rights Movement.
“They grew up in an era where they couldn't do all the things,” she said. “So I grew up in an environment in which my folks were constantly telling me, ‘You can do anything you want to do.’ And they meant it because for them now, this was a whole new world of opportunities.”
“The law had changed and given Black people the chance to participate fully in society,” she continued, referencing the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act and the end of Jim Crow laws.
She said her parents raised her to be “very proud” of her heritage, having attended historically Black colleges and universities. Her father returned to law school when she was three.
She has a memory of flipping through a magazine and finding she shared a birthday with Judge Constance Baker Motley, the first Black woman appointed to a federal bench. Their shared birthday was just two days prior to the event.
“So here was this Black woman who was a judge. And this was not all that long after Justice [Sandra Day] O'Connor had been appointed to the Supreme Court,” Jackson said. “So I had all these ideas about possibly being a judge, so much so that when I got into high school, I wrote in my high school yearbook… I said that I wanted someday to study law and have a federal judicial appointment.”
She certainly seemed to drum up a similar feeling with some of the younger attendees, including two nine-year-old girls who spoke during the question and answer portion of the program.
The pair asked, fittingly for a book tour, what Jackson's favorite chapter book was.
Her answer: "A Wrinkle in Time."
