Supreme Court justice visits NC as part of national tour

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U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson will visit Greensboro and Charlotte as part of a national tour supporting her memoir “Lovely One.”

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson will be in North Carolina next week to share her story.

Jackson, the first Black woman to serve on the nation’s top court, will speak in Greensboro and Charlotte – first, at North Carolina A&T State University on Sept. 3, followed by an appearance at Carolina Theater, 230 N. Tryon St. Sept. 4. The Charlotte forum, sponsored by the Harvey B. Gantt Center for African American Arts + Culture, starts at 7 p.m. Tickets for the Charlotte forum are sold out.

The A&T gathering, which is restricted to students, faculty and staff, will be held at Harrison Auditorium beginning at 6 p.m. Her Charlotte appearance coincides with an appearance by the center’s namesake, Charlotte’s first Black mayor and the first Black student to desegregate Clemson University.

Jackson, 54, is touring the country in support of her 2024 memoir “Lovely One,” which tells her life story culminating in her 2022 confirmation to the court.   

Jackson’s memoir is a story of faith, and optimism that starts in her hometown of Miami and ends at the start of her tenure at the Supreme Court. She credits Black trailblazers who paved the way – Justice Thurgood Marshall, the first African American confirmed to the Supreme Court as well as Judge Constance Baker Motley, the first Black woman to argue a case before the Supreme Court as an attorney with the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund before her appointment to the federal bench. 

Since joining the court, Jackson has been a consistent member of its liberal wing and a notable dissenter against the conservative supermajority as a critic of decisions that have unraveled long-established precedents on issues like civil rights and the inclusion of race in college admissions. 

Jackson’s sharp written opposition to conservative rulings have gained her a national reputation for aggressive and disciplined defiance of what she’s described as an inconsistent approach to justice.

Jackson, who grew up in Miami, earned an undergraduate degree from Harvard University and graduated Harvard Law School. She clerked for Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, worked as a federal public defender and a pair of private law firms. President Barack Obama nominated her to the U.S. Sentencing Commission in 2009 and federal district judge for the District of Columbia in 2013.

After eight years on that court, she was nominated to the U.S. Court of Appeals in 2021 by President Joe Biden, who nominated her the following year to the Supreme Court.

A&T, the nation’s largest historically Black college has its own history in America’s legal community, although it doesn’t have a law school. 

Among its graduates, Henry Frye (Class of 1953), was the first Black chief justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court; Elreta Alexander-Ralston (1937) was the first Black woman to practice law in the state and its first elected Black judge. Shirley Fulton (Class of 1977) was Mecklenburg County’s first Black woman prosecutor.

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