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1. Watch the following video which provides background on Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson and how she could reshape the nation’s highest court. President Biden’s nomination of Brown Jackson to the U.S. Supreme Court is a landmark moment for Black women across the legal field, who throughout American history have made up less than 2 percent of the federal bench. Transcript here.

Discuss this statement by Margaret Russell, of the Santa Clara University Law School and ask students: How does the Supreme Court end up deciding “the fate of millions and millions of Americans, including African Americans”? Can you think of specific Supreme Court cases in which this happened? (i.e. Brown vs. Board of Education, Dred Scott vs. Sanford, Powell v. Alabama (“Scottsboro Boys”), etc. Click here to see more cases.)

For African American women in the legal profession, it has been a long uphill battle. That is also true of other groups. But the significance of Judge Jackson’s ascendancy to a court that, when it first sat in 1790, had all white men, of course, six white men, and did not have a Black member of the court until the 1960s and a female member of the court until the 1980s, should really be cause for reflection, not just sort of a recitative regurgitation of facts.

But what it means is that there is a history of exclusion in the legal profession and a history of exclusion among people who actually decide the fate of millions and millions of Americans, including African Americans.

2. Watch this NewsHour clip about the movie Marshall to learn more about the life of Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. Before he became the first African American to serve on the Supreme Court, Thurgood Marshall moved from town to town as part of the NAACP to represent Black defendants in a justice system rampant with discrimination. In 2017, Jeffrey Brown sat down with director Reginald Hudlin and actor Chadwick Boseman (1976-2020) to discuss their film “Marshall,” and how they captured the iconic judge in his youth. Transcript: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/marshall-pays-homage-to-the-young-lawyer-who-became-a-towering-justice

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