
The first-ever Black woman to serve on the US Supreme Court has urged Americans to confront “uncomfortable” truths about the nation’s past and its legacy of racist violence as she addressed a congregation recognising the 60th anniversary of a lethal act of white supremacist terror.
US Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s unsparing remarks from Birmingham, Alabama, on 15 September reflected on the Ku Klux Klan’s bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church that killed four girls — 11-year-old Denise McNair and 14-year-olds Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson and Addie Mae Collins — and galvanised a civil rights movement facing threats of racist violence.