Biden Nominates Ketanji Jackson to Supreme Court, Keeps Pledge to Make Pick Based On Race And Sex

I’m proud to announce that I am nominating Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to serve on the Supreme Court. Currently serving on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, she is one of our nation’s brightest legal minds and will be an exceptional Justice.https://t.co/iePvhz1YaA pic.twitter.com/Nzqv2AtN8h

— President Biden (@POTUS) February 25, 2022

"You've had a couple of opportunities to mention naming a Black woman to the Supreme Court," Clyburn lectured his friend [Joe Biden] of nearly half a century, like a schoolteacher scolding a child. "I'm telling you, don't you leave the [South Carolina Democrat debate] stage tonight without making it known that you will do that."

Biden had seemed to get it the night before, when Clyburn talked to him at a Congressional Black Caucus reception aboard the USS Yorktown, a decommissioned aircraft carrier that sat in Charleston Harbor as part of a naval museum.

Biden was desperate to get Clyburn's endorsement. Very few endorsements carry weight in modern politics. In South Carolina, though, a perception had built up that Clyburn's imprimatur meant everything. Voters believed it, the media believed it, and even most political insiders thought there was at least a good helping of truth in it. There was no Black political figure in the history of the state who had more influence with Black voters in South Carolina or across the Deep South.

[...] In his closing remarks [at the debate], Biden fumbled out the promise. "Everyone should be represented," he said in answer to a question about his personal motto and the biggest misconception about him. "The fact is, what we should be doing — we talked about the Supreme Court. I'm looking forward to making sure there's a Black woman on the Supreme Court, to make sure we in fact get every representation."

When Ketanji Brown Jackson was a student at Harvard, one of her classmates draped a Confederate battle flag outside his dorm window in the middle of Harvard Yard, the center of the university's campus.

Jackson, who was active in the Black Students Association, helped plan rallies and circulate petitions to protest the university's response, and later joined in calls to hire more faculty in the African American studies department. She wore black instead of the school's crimson and white to an annual Harvard-Yale football game as part of a demonstration to "embarrass the university in front of the alumni," Jackson told the local newspaper in 1990.

Three decades later, Jackson, who is President Biden's pick to replace Merrick Garland on the influential federal appeals court in Washington, recalled thinking it was unfair that in addition to being victimized and getting little support from the university, Black students missed classes and "could not just be regular students" while protesting the flag display.

It was, she told aspiring Black lawyers at a dinner in her honor at the University of Chicago last year, what the student who unfurled the Confederate flag had wanted: "For us to be so distracted that we failed our classes and thereby reinforced the stereotype that we couldn't cut it at a place like Harvard."