



Some Black women say that hasn’t been the case.Įven when Motley and her cohort were not mentioned by name, their legacy loomed large in the hearings, including in some of the more antagonistic moments. Republicans said this week’s Supreme Court hearing wouldn’t feature character attacks or theatrics. Politics ‘Hard to watch’: For Black women, Ketanji Brown Jackson hearing feels all too familiar “I vividly remember looking up to and admiring her, and feeling like if she could do it, I could do it.” “I believe every little Black girl who wants to be a lawyer knew about Constance Baker Motley,” said Njeri Mathis Rutledge, who was friends with Jackson when they were law school students at Harvard University and now teaches law at the South Texas College of Law. Motley is indeed less well-known than other civil rights figures, but for the women of Jackson’s generation, she was a star. Thurgood Marshall got most of the credit, but she did a lot of the work. Richard Blumenthal, eager to tout that Motley was a daughter of his home state of Connecticut, remarked, “She was very predominantly responsible for Brown versus Board of Education. Politics Senate advances Jackson’s Supreme Court nomination after committee deadlocksĪn evenly split Senate committee deadlocked along partisan lines on a vote to advance Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, President Biden’s Supreme Court nominee.ĭemocratic Sen. Motley, a protege of Marshall’s, was the first Black woman to argue before the Court and was appointed to the federal judiciary in 1966. Houston was Marshall’s mentor and key architect of the strategy to chip away at legalized segregation in the run-up to Brown. Marshall, the lead lawyer, later became the first Black Supreme Court justice. Board of Education case, in which the Supreme Court struck down the doctrine of “separate but equal” in public schools. The lawyers most often cited by Jackson, 50, and Harris, 57, were all involved with the landmark Brown vs.
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The Senate Judiciary Committee is scheduled to vote on Jackson’s confirmation on Monday and will likely deadlock, although Democrats will still be able to advance her nomination to the full Senate for final approval. As members of the first generation to follow the civil rights movement, she said, “we all had very common role models because there were not very many people before us.” “When you see them, you see the generation of Black lawyers before them, many of them who have largely gone unheralded,” said Danielle Holley-Walker, dean of the Howard University School of Law.
