On a cool morning in May, Harriet Tubman arrived at the chambers of Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the first Black woman to sit on the Supreme Court of the United States since the nation’s birth 250 years ago. Out on the National Mall, a pale sun cast stone monuments to the country’s founders in a flinty gray; but inside Jackson’s chambers, dazzling oil pastel strokes on canvas created a vibrant halo around Harriet Tubman’s turbaned head, with exuberant bursts of color radiating outward, in artist Glenn Ligon‘s depiction of the Black pioneer who led enslaved people to freedom in the mid-1800s.

Jackson fell in love with the work not long after she’d blazed her own trail by becoming the 116th Associate Justice, on June 30, 2022. Aware that local public museums lend art to offices across the branches of the federal government, Jackson decided to showcase Black art in her own chambers. She wanted to demonstrate the pride she feels in her heritage—and also her gratitude for being in a position to make a rare and significant contribution to her country, after generations of unfairly diminished opportunity. Attracted to the energy and optimism in the rainbow of color emanating from Tubman, Jackson recalls Ligon saying of his subject, “Harriet’s mission was always ‘Not just my freedom, but everybody’s freedom.'”
“That was so powerful to me,” Jackson reflects now, “because that is similar to how I think of my own charge. My duty is to support and defend the Constitution of the United States, which means making sure that all people are able to exercise the rights and freedoms secured by that document. But also, in a broader sense, fighting for everybody’s freedom is the foundational task that has engaged Black people, in one form or another, from the moment this country was born.”

In Jackson’s family, that quest was first embodied for her by her parents, Johnny and Ellery Brown. Both schoolteachers raised under Jim Crow segregation in Miami, they educated themselves at HBCUs and marched, organized and petitioned to change the laws. The Browns also consciously instilled racial pride in their children, giving them African names—Ketanji Onyika means “Lovely One,” and Jackson’s younger brother’s name, Ketajh Mikobi, means “Son of a King.” Jackson’s parents also filled their home with Black art, literature, music and history volumes—and occasionally dressed her and themselves in colorful wax-print fabrics from the Motherland.

When Jackson was 4, her father returned to school at the University of Miami to study law. Her mother supported the family during that time, teaching science to junior high schoolers. Every evening, as her mom cooked dinner, her dad immersed himself in legal texts at the kitchen table. Little Ketanji would sit opposite him, feet dangling, coloring books open, mimicking his studiousness and waiting for the moments when he would look up and talk to her about his cases. Those evenings planted the seeds of her belief in the potential of the law to set right what had gone wrong in people’s lives and to make the world better for everyone.

Only a few years before she was born, that belief had found expression in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which outlawed racial segregation and declared all citizens equal under the law. In this newly opened world, a child as diligent, charismatic and scholarly as Ketanji Brown was bound to thrive. She excelled academically, won national debate titles and was elected by her peers as class president at her new majority-White high school. She earned admission to Harvard College, where she was involved in theater, majored in Government and roomed with a trio of Black women who would become her sisters for life.

She also met a boy, Patrick Jackson—a premed Boston Brahmin whose forebears came to America aboard the Mayflower, while hers had been forcibly brought to this land chained in the holds of slave ships. She doubted that their vastly different worlds could truly be bridged; but Patrick, smitten the moment he set eyes on her in their “Changing Concept of Race in America” class, persevered. At the end of their sophomore year, they began dating. Six years later, after he graduated from Columbia Medical School in 1995 and she from Harvard Law in 1996, they married. They became the parents of two girls, Talia and Leila, and swapped frontline domestic duties back and forth as they navigated the often intense periods that came with their high-octane careers.

And then came the biggest trial of all. Having been appointed to the federal bench in 2013 by President Barack Obama, Jackson was tapped on February 25, 2022, by President Joe Biden, to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice Stephen G. Breyer, for whom she had previously clerked. The Senate confirmation hearings were contentious, but Jackson steadied her oar in the turbulent waters and steered her way through. Her family and friends never doubted that she would. They knew her grace, the humor dancing in her eyes, her kindness and sparkling intellect. But they also knew the steel in her spine and the tenacity behind her calm stare. They knew that she was a woman built for exactly such a moment. As the nation watched, she weathered the onslaught, dignified and true.

And that is how she came to be in a position to adorn her new Supreme Court chambers with the works of Black artists—including Sam Gilliam, Alma Thomas and William H. Johnson. Harriet Tubman now watches over Jackson, from the wall behind her desk, as she tackles the tough legal challenges of this critical period. The gains of the Civil Rights Movement—which wedged open doors for a generation, including for Jackson herself—are under siege, but the good Justice isn’t breaking stride. She may have taken her share of slings and arrows in Court decisions that have not gone her way; but she has also launched her own volleys, sharply worded and flawlessly aimed, in the numerous dissents she has written when convinced that the majority got a ruling wrong. In those pages, her voice rings out—clear, unsparing and entirely her own.

Court-watchers are already calling her our new “Great Dissenter,” noting how fearless and meticulously reasoned her opinions are. Some context is useful here: “To be a Great Dissenter,” explains Sherrilyn Ifill, civil rights lawyer and founding director of the 14th Amendment Center for Law & Democracy at the Howard University School of Law, “is to write dissenting opinions that are so original and authoritative, in tone and substance, that they draw almost as much attention—sometimes more—than the majority opinion. Justice Jackson may be the most junior justice, but she is also the most provocative in her ideas, original in her approach and scholarly in her writing.”

Here, our modern-day pioneer gives a close-up view of her life as America’s first Black woman Supreme Court Justice—and reminds us, as Tubman reminds her, that no matter how fraught the times, We The People have always known what it takes to ensure that not just one but all of us can be free. —R.R.

I often marvel that my ambition, since I was an audacious 12-year-old, to become a federal judge—like my hero and birthday twin, Constance Baker Motley—so fortuitously coincided with the arc of American history. I was born on September 14, 1970, when all the marches, sit-ins, boycotts and voter-registration drives of the Civil Rights Movement had finally come to full flower. Unlike my parents and grandparents, I grew up in Miami attending integrated schools and enjoying multicultural friendships; I dreamed so boldly that I actually stated in my Harvard application essay that I hoped to one day sit on the Supreme Court. Me—a Black girl one generation removed from Jim Crow!
I hardly stopped to think that the freedoms my ancestors watered with blood and tears might still be fragile blooms. I know better now. The events of recent years have shown us all that we can take nothing for granted when it comes to individual rights in this country. Indeed, as we approach the 250th anniversary of the democratic project that is the United States of America, many are reeling with shock, anger, grief, numbness, despair.

These emotions are understandable, reasonable, real. Yet I believe with a passion that we cannot afford to weaken ourselves by giving in to fear and hopelessness. Rather, we need to square our shoulders and reframe this challenging moment in our national story. We have only to look to history to understand that we have been through hard times before. The hardest. And we prevailed. As Sherrilyn Ifill, professor of law at Howard University School of Law, expressed it in her convocation speech to the school last fall: Black Americans of a certain age have “lived and benefited from the harvest of the Civil Rights Movement. But harvest is not forever. You have to plant, too. And right now, I believe it is planting time. It doesn’t mean we don’t fight—it means we fight and we plant.”
One might say that’s what I’m doing now. Every day, in my role as a Justice, I rise with a purpose: to fight the good fight and plant seeds for our collective future.

A Day in the Life

I awaken a full hour before my alarm goes off, my mind already churning. We’re set to hear oral arguments in two new cases this morning, which makes this a good day. Oral arguments are my favorite part of the job—a dynamic process in which advocates argue both sides of an issue and field questions from Justices. I’m always listening intently for my colleagues’ questions, as I usually don’t have much prior knowledge of what they might be thinking about the case. Then, through my own questions, I try to gather information as well as elicit answers that I hope will illuminate the issue in ways that are helpful to my colleagues—or at least will give them a sense of how I’m thinking about the case. And because oral arguments are live-streamed, I’m also speaking to the American people. I pose questions that will be comprehended easily by someone who isn’t a lawyer but wants to know more about the issue.
As I lie there in the dark on oral argument days—my brain buzzing with case notes for that morning, fresh angles on already heard cases I might want to share with my law clerks and sentences I might want to add to an opinion draft—I make myself stay in bed until my analog alarm clock rings. My phone isn’t in the room with me. Deep rest is hard enough to come by with the demands of my day job, so I leave the phone in my home office, to avoid being tempted to scroll endlessly or keep working in bed. I don’t worry about my girls being able to contact me, because Patrick is beside me. As the Chief of General Surgery at MedStar Georgetown University Hospital, he has to be reachable at all times. If the girls need us, they know to call their dad.

As soon as the alarm sounds, though, it’s on. I wash up and change into my gym clothes. Maybe I pop into my office to jot down a few notes; then I head upstairs for my morning workout: 45 minutes of cardio or weights, plus breathing and stretching routines. I have my phone with me now. I stream workout videos while I exercise but ignore the texts steadily rolling in from my law clerks. My gym time is sacrosanct. It clears my mind and boosts my energy for the day ahead. Meanwhile, Patrick makes me a breakfast smoothie, leaves it in the refrigerator, and steeps hot black tea in an insulated mug, setting that out on the counter. He walks the dog, gets dressed, kisses me goodbye—and he’s off to the hospital for rounds. We are ships passing in the morning.

After I shower and dress, I grab my case files and my smoothie and tea, then meet my security escort to be driven to the Court. Once in the car, I drink my smoothie, sip my tea and finally survey my messages. My daughters, both college night owls, have usually texted the evening before. I respond to them first; then my workday begins in earnest.
I spend the first hour or so in the office finalizing my oral-argument questions and checking in with my law clerks. About half an hour before the Court session starts at 10 A.M., I get robed in my chambers, touch up my makeup and select the statement necklace I’ll wear that day. Like the lace collars and ruffled jabots worn by my predecessors Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sandra Day O’Connor, my necklaces—from states across the country and far-flung places like South Africa, Indonesia, Brazil and India—add a feminine touch to the stark severity of the black robe. I have a closet where the jewelry is hung, so I can see at a glance what piece might be speaking to me that morning. But there’s an even more special aspect to my robing, something hidden and deeply meaningful to me. Sewn into the garment’s lining, across my shoulders, is a panel of African fabric from a dashiki dress my mother wore in a photograph of us from when I was 2 years old. In the picture, she is holding my hand. Now, when I’m in my robe, she still covers me with her protection.

In my judicial attire, I walk to the room where all nine Justices customarily convene before hearings. There, we engage in the ritual of shaking each other’s hands before the buzzer goes off and we take our places on the stately wing-shaped bench. The first order of business is the presentation and swearing in of lawyers being admitted to the Supreme Court bar. I always enjoy seeing so many people from all over the country, representing a range of experiences and backgrounds, who have done the work to be recognized in this way. Then it’s time for oral arguments, for me the most intellectually stimulating and rewarding part of my day. It’s when I get to listen to skilled advocates make creative legal arguments—and to use my voice in the public forum to share a perspective that can be considered by all concerned. And I get to hear and consider other perspectives, too.

Every day, in my role as a Justice, I rise with a purpose: to fight the good fight and plant seeds for our collective future. – Ketanji Brown Jackson

A couple of afternoons a month, after the Court session is done, I meet with groups who are visiting to get a taste of the arguments. On this day, a group of 50 Black and Latino law students from New Jersey, and some of their professors, have arranged a Court tour and meeting with me in one of the conference rooms. I make myself available because I want young people to know that they matter, and that they can do and be anything they want. I’m trying to get them to believe in themselves, because they will have to carry the baton for the next leg of the race and they need to be ready.

“How does it feel to be the first Black woman serving in a space that was not made for you?” a young woman in the group asks me, her eyes bright and intense. I respond from a place of gratitude, hoping to transmit that sense. I explain that, historically, many spaces were set up to exclude people who look like us; the fact that we can now enter these environments is an enormous advancement for our people and a major achievement for our country. We should embrace that, because we can now make decisions and take actions that we were prohibited from doing before. It may not always be easy to be a “first” or an “only,” but it’s worthwhile. The young woman nods, apparently satisfied.

Much later—after a long afternoon of discussing cases with my law clerks and editing opinion drafts inside the soaring marble edifice where so much history has been, and continues to be, made—I head for home. There, I change out of my work clothes and sit down with my husband to enjoy a meal of chicken-and-vegetable stir-fry over rice that he has made for us. I release a breath of pure peace as we reconnect for the first time that day. We talk about our girls and our parents, the news and, in a general way, our work—because in both jobs, confidentiality must be observed. But after three decades of melding our lives in law and medicine, we are used to this. We know how to step gently.

Joy in the Morning

People often ask me: How do I stay hopeful during these challenging times for our country? Civil rights activists point to the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Voting Rights Act case this past spring—when a majority of my colleagues decided that challengers who alleged race discrimination due to gerrymandering by states had to prove discriminatory intent, rather than discriminatory effect, in the way voting districts were drawn. Many considered the ruling as much a gut punch as, say, the 2023 opinion that struck down affirmative action in college and university admissions. As stated in my dissents, to my mind, a number of the Court’s recent decisions have been at odds with our Constitution’s guarantee of a fair and free society in which all are afforded equal treatment and equal justice under the law.

So how do I continue to rise each day with as much faith in America’s next 250 years as my work requires? Fortunately, I am equipped with an arsenal of resources. These include resilience and a sense of purpose—fostered in me by those who raised and mentored me, but most especially my parents and grandparents. “Guard your spirit, Ketanji,” my mother, Ellery Brown, would say if she saw me becoming rattled by the world’s injustices. “To dwell on the unfairness of life is to be devoured by it.” And whenever our family encountered hardships, my maternal grandmother, Euzera Ross, would recite one of her favorite Psalms, 30:5—reminding us that “weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.”
Another source of strength is my written dissents. As one of only nine people in this nation able to exercise this privilege in cases of national consequence, I am using this powerful tool very deliberately—to ensure that the American people, now and in the future, fully understand the issues being decided by the Court. But dissents aren’t just a way of calling to a future age. They also signal that our nation’s core democratic values—freedom of expression and a tolerance of minority views—endure.

And that’s the beauty of where we find ourselves in this moment: We can till the soil and sow the seeds, knowing that another harvest will come. But we also need to recognize that we are in a new era of the American democratic project. “This is a new frontier,” explains LaTosha Brown, cofounder of Black Voters Matter, in her newsletter Contraband Camp. “The old tools have been broken. We do not lay them down because we are tired. We lay them down because they no longer fit the work in front of us. New frontier. New tools. New thinking. New solutions. New people stepping into power who have been waiting their whole lives for this call. We are the architects now. Pick up the tools, so that we become the founders of what is next.”

It’s going to take all of us to build the nation of our dreams. That’s one reason I so appreciate being able to meet and talk with Americans from all walks of life, when I travel for public appearances and speaking engagements during Court breaks. On a recent trip to Los Angeles, I was waiting on the jet bridge to board my flight home when an airport worker who had just helped a wheelchair passenger onto the plane pulled up beside me. “I know you!” he exclaimed, his face alight with recognition. “Your name is Brown! You work in Washington! Look!”—he eagerly showed me the name tag pinned to his uniform—”I’m a Brown, too!” I greeted him warmly as he kept going. “I know what you do,” he enthused. “You are a judge! You may not think I would know that. But I want you to know something: I see you, Brown. I see you. We see you. And we’re grateful for all the hard work you are doing for us.”
I thanked him and boarded the plane, flooded with gratitude for this person who stopped to let me know that I was not toiling in vain. He is why I can never lose hope. Because just as he sees me, I see him, as I see all of you out there—the architects of our future, the toolmakers, the tillers of the soil, the ones who, even now, are planting new seeds and trusting the harvest to come.

Rosemarie Robotham is the author of 10 books, including two New York Times bestsellers. Most recently, she collaborated with Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson on her award-winning memoir Lovely One.

PRODUCTION CREDITS

Photographer and Production: Peace Bureau
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