Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was greeted by 200 people cheering her on Saturday as she entered a tent at the Island Inn in Oak Bluffs, where the Martha’s Vineyard Black Book Festival was gathering.
Jackson, who has served on the nation’s highest court since the summer of 2022, was the first author to speak at the event.
Twenty-two authors spoke on Saturday, including Reverend Liz Walker, Former U.S. Secretary of Education John B. King, filmmaker Malcolm D. Lee, Emory University professor Karida L. Brown, entrepreneur and political organizer John Conyers III, and pilot Carole Hopson.
Traci Wilkes Smith, founder of the MV Black Book Festival, told the crowd to “immerse yourself in the assembly of brilliant authors and their stories.”
Justice Jackson came to discuss her memoir “Lovely One,” published by Random House last year. She read from the preface of her book, before sitting down for a conversation with Smith, who began their interview asking why Jackson chose the title. Jackson explained that when she was born, her mother asked her aunt, who was in the Peace Crops in West Africa at the time, to send her a list of African names. “She selected Ketanji Onyika, which she was told meant ‘lovely one.’”
She went on to talk about how her parents and the timing of her birth — she was born in 1970 — set her on the path to the Supreme Court. “It was a time of great optimism and enthusiasm for African Americans [and] the newfound freedoms in our society. And my parents were so intentional about making me feel and believe that I could do anything I wanted to do.”
Reading an article in Essence Magazine when she was eleven, Justice Jackson noticed that her birthday fell on the same date as Judge Constance Baker Motley, who made history as the first Black woman to sit as a federal judge. “I always thought I wanted to be a lawyer, but then I come across this revelation that the first Black female federal judge is my birthday twin. And I just thought, you know, maybe I could be a judge, because when you see other people doing the kinds of things that you were interested in, who are like you and who lived a life that has similarities to your own, you really start to dream bigger.”
Smith asked Justice Jackson for any words of wisdom before the interview ended. Jackson responded by saying, “I don’t know that I have any particular words of wisdom, other than to say we are obviously going through pretty challenging times right now. And it’s very important that people stay tuned into what is happening in our government and in our society, that the real danger … is for people to tune out — because this is your government, this is your society, this is your life, and we live in a democracy where the people are supposed to be the ones that decide what happens.”
Despite sharing political views with Justice Jackson, I have read her dissents and I have to say she is a disappointing jurist from the position of legal reasoning and considered judgement. I, too, share her emotions, but she wears her politics on her sleeve and doesn’t offer the intellectual probity to back it up, not the way Justice Sotomayor does. I hope she improves by experience, because at present she seems more like an alarmist citizen who just happens to be sitting on the highest of our courts, when we need real reasoning and acumen more than ever, not fear and political hyperbole.
Appointed by non compos mentis Biden, so she really wasn’t appointed by a sound President.
She wouldn’t have been appointed or nominated under normal circumstances.