In a series of exchanges with Alabama’s solicitor general, US Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson delivered a powerful history lesson on the explicit racial justice foundations of Reconstruction-era constitutional amendments, aiming to undermine the state’s defence of its congressional maps that a federal court has determined are racially discriminatory.
On her second day on the nine-member court, Justice Jackson argued that the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments – drafted in the bloody aftermath of the US Civil War – were written with the explicit purpose of providing equal opportunity and rights to formerly enslaved people.
