President Biden fulfills his campaign promise to select the nation’s first Black woman to become Supreme Court justice.
President Joe Biden will officially make history when he announces Ketanji Brown Jackson as his nominee to become the first Black woman to serve on the Supreme Court of the United States.
A source close to the White House confirmed Brown Jackson as Biden’s pick. The president is expected to make the announcement Friday.
Judge Brown Jackson, 51, currently sits on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. She was confirmed in June 2021 by the U.S. Senate with bipartisan support. The vote was 55 to 44.
Republicans like Senator Lindsay Graham voted to confirm the judge who began her career in private practice in Washington, D.C. in 2002. In 2010, Brown Jackson served as the vice-chair and commissioner of the United States Sentencing Commission. During that same time, she also served as a federal trial court judge for eight years.
Brown Jackson comes from a family that is steeped in law enforcement with an uncle and brother in Miami and Baltimore police departments. However, her family life is not without some commonality with many Black families.
During Jackson’s early years in service as a public defender, she received a request from a distant uncle who was serving a life sentence on federal drug charges. She subsequently referred her uncle to a prominent Washington D.C. law firm that filed a petition for clemency for her uncle. Her uncle, Thomas Brown, was released at 78 years old in 2016 when then-President Barack Obama commuted the sentence after he spent over 25 years in prison.
Source: President Biden will nominate Ketanji Brown Jackson to US Supreme Court
