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In one of her first public appearances on behalf of her newly published memoir, “Lovely One,” Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson didn't make a lot of news, but she did make a little history: She can add her name to James Brown, Stevie Wonder and Smokey Robinson among others as someone who has sung at the Apollo Theater.
Reminiscing Tuesday night with interviewer Gayle King about her love for musical theater, Jackson ably crooned a few lines from “The Wiz” — “When I think of home, I think of a place/Where there’s love overflowing” — and threw in a favorite chant from “Schoolhouse Rock” — “I’m just a bill, yes I’m only a bill. And I’m sitting here on Capitol Hill.”
The capacity audience at the famed Harlem performance center cheered and sang along.
King had promised — and kept her promise — to focus on Jackson's personal story and not on the law. Jackson discussed her childhood in Miami, the origins of her name (It means “lovely one,” the book's title), her undergraduate years at Harvard University, her interracial marriage to Dr. Patrick Jackson — who was in the audience Tuesday night — and her rise through the court system, culminating in 2022 when she became the first Black woman on the Supreme Court. “A roaring ocean” in her ears is how she remembered the call from President Joe Biden, asking her if she would agree to fill the vacancy left by retiring Justice Stephen Breyer, for whom she had once clerked.
Jackson explained Tuesday that she had been interested since she was a girl, when she and her father, Johnny Brown, would sit together at the dining room table, she with coloring books and he with law books he was studying at the time. Her ambition grew in middle school after she learned about Constance Baker Motley, the first Black woman to serve on the federal judiciary.
“I remember this kinship with this fantastic woman,” Jackson told King. "I thought, 'Why stop at law? I could be a federal judge."
Jackson's book, 405 pages, combines family history, legal history and personal history as she narrates her own improbable journey — a Black woman rising to the highest court in a country where segregation was legal well into the 20th century. “Lovely One” often reads as a kind of lesson, or roadmap, what Jackson calls in the preface “a testament for young women, people of color, and strivers everywhere, especially those who nourished outsized ambitions and believe with stubborn faith in the possibility of achieving them.”
She endured aggressive questions from Republican senators during her confirmation hearings and she currently serves on one of the most conservative and divisive courts in U.S. history, casting dissenting votes on such landmark rulings as the granting of partial legal immunity for former presidents. But Jackson avoided naming names — beyond noting that Sen. Ted Cruz, the Texas Republican, attended law school with her — or pointing fingers in her book, and resisted Tuesday night when King pressed her to cite even one justice she had clashed with.
“I'm not going to answer that question,” she said, laughing.
When King asked if justices socialized, Jackson responded, “There are opportunities to have lunch."
Jackson spoke of remaining calm during the confirmation hearings, thanks to her resolve, her preparation and to political realities. The White House worked with her at length in advance, helping her anticipate questions that might otherwise have upset her. One aide had advised she had a choice: "You can get angry or you can be a Supreme Court justice." Jackson also welcomed another suggestion: Meet with the senators before the hearings.
“They were all lovely. Person to person they were courteous, they were respectful," she said Tuesday night. “It was ... super helpful in the hearings, because we had had conversations. So I said, ‘Oh, I see. You’re not really talking to me' — right in my head, as I'm listening to them — because we had talked. ‘You must be talking to your constituents or to someone else.’"
