We are highlighting examples of Black excellence throughout the year! Feel free to send us suggestions!
He was fired by Amazon2 years ago. Nowhe’s the force behind the company’s 1st union
“He’s not smart, or articulate.”
Those were the words used by a top Amazon lawyer to describe former warehouse worker Chris Smalls.
Smalls had led a walkout at the start of the pandemic in 2020 to protest working conditions at the Staten Island, N.Y., warehouse where he worked. He was fired the same day.
The memo that contained those biting words was leaked just a few days later. But the words would stay with Smalls. They became the fuel that would drive him to lead one of the most dramatic and successful grassroots union drives in recent history.
“When I read that memo, that motivated me to start an organization,” said Smalls, celebrating the historic victory of the Amazon Labor Union on Friday, making the warehouse Amazon’s first unionized workplace in the U.S.
Friday’s triumph would come almost two years to the day of his firing.
At the time, Amazon said Smalls had violated quarantine and safety measures. But Smalls said he was fired in retaliation for his activism. The New York attorney general followed with an investigation and sued Amazon for the incident and even sought to get Smalls his job back.
Smalls didn’t sit still after being fired, and formed the Amazon Labor Union soon after.
Meetings at a bus stop, barbecue and funding through GoFundMe
Smalls had zero union background, nor did he rely on any established labor groups for funding and organizing power.
Instead he raised money for the operation through GoFundMe. Smalls and his co-founder Derrick Palmer — who’s still working at the warehouse — reached out to their coworkers.
The bus stop used by workers became their gathering place. They’d wait there to talk to workers who were heading home from their shifts. They’d have a bonfire going, with s’mores, and get people talking. They invited workers to cookouts.
“We had over 20 some barbecues, giving out food every single week, every single day, whether it was pizza, chicken, pasta,” Smalls said. He even brought home-cooked food from his aunt to some of these gatherings.
They talked to workers about fighting for their rights,about the grueling toll of the job, how you’re on your feet, doing very repetitive, very physically demanding work, for hours. About the breaks that are few and too short.
No one expected this scrappy grassroots campaign to emerge victorious against the behemoth company. Indeed, a first attempt failed. But Smalls persevered, eventually meeting the 30% threshold necessary to hold a vote.
Amazon got Smalls arrested for trespassing
Amazon, meanwhile, spent millions of dollars on labor consultants to fight the union campaigns. The company held mandatory meetings with workers in the warehouse, urging them to vote No.
Amazon even had Smalls and a couple other organizers arrested for trespassing while they were delivering food and union materials to the warehouse parking lot earlier this year.
Amazon’s argument to workers is that it is already a great place to work, without a union. It offers competitive pay, and generous benefits like health care coverage for full time employees and full tuition for college.
But Smalls’ efforts clearly bore fruit.
Almost 5,000 workers cast their ballots and the votes to form a union were won by a significant margin — more than 500 votes.
Amazon had wanted to belittle the union drive two years ago, when as part of its PR strategy the company said it would make Smalls “the face of the entire union/organizing movement.”
And that’s exactly what happened. Except today, Smalls has become the face of one of the most successful union drives in recent history.
And Amazon has suffered an embarrassing defeat.
“Amazon doesn’t become Amazon without the people,” Smalls said. “And we make Amazon what it is.”
Editors’ note: Amazon is among NPR’s financial supporters and also distributes certain NPR content.
We are highlighting examples of Black excellence throughout the year! Feel free to send us suggestions!
The oldest park ranger, who told the stories of Black women in WWII, retires at 100
There’s no better way to learn history than from the people who lived it. And for years, Betty Reid Soskin — a.k.a. Ranger Betty — brought her invaluable perspective to work at the National Park Service, sharing experiences that otherwise would have been gone unacknowledged.
“What gets remembered is a function of who’s in the room doing the remembering,” Soskin, who turned 100 last fall, has said.
For years, Soskin was the oldest active ranger in the park service, leading public programs at the Rosie the Riveter/WWII Home Front National Historical Park in Richmond, Calif. That chapter of her rich life has finally come to a close: She retired on Thursday, capping a career that saw her enrich histories of the World War II home front with her own experience as a woman of color facing segregation and hours of toil.
While Rosie the Riveter was the famous public face of women’s industrial work during the war, Soskin literally had to create the space to tell stories like her own.
“That really is a white woman’s story,” Soskin said of the iconic bandanna-wearing worker, in a 2014 interview with NPR.
Soskin initially helped shape the historical park in Richmond through planning meetings. Then she worked with the park service through a third-party grant highlighting Black Americans’ experiences during World War II. Her drive to ensure park visitors understand the broader context of the war effort, and the backdrop of racism and segregation, led to her accepting a temp position at age 84, and then a permanent job.
As a young woman during World War II, Soskin worked as a shipyard clerk for an all-Black auxiliary lodge of the Boilermakers union, which didn’t allow people of color to join as regular members.
For added perspective, consider that Soskin’s great-grandmother, who had been born into slavery in 1846 and lived to be 102, was still alive as her family’s youngest members continued to cope with institutional racism — even as Soskin helped the U.S. war effort.
In 1945, Soskin and her husband, Mel Reid, opened a renowned record store — Reid’s Records — in Berkeley that stayed in business for nearly 75 years before closing in 2019, selling soul and gospel music.
Soskin says she has lived “lots and lots of lives”
Soskin has lived “lots and lots of lives,” she told NPR in 2014, including writing protest songs during the civil rights movement and working for years in local politics. Years after enduring segregation, she used those experiences to add vivid life to tours and discussions at the Rosie the Riveter Home Front park.
Accolades have rolled in for Soskin. The California Legislature named her Woman of the Year in 1995. The World War II Museum in New Orleans awarded her its silver medallion. She has a middle school named after her.
And in 2015, Soskin introduced President Barack Obama during the national tree-lighting ceremony in Washington. For that occasion, she carried a unique piece of her own history in her pocket: a photo of her great-grandmother.
It was the same photo she brought to watch Obama be sworn in as president, in 2009.
“It’s a kind of experience that covers years, and decades, and centuries,” she said of bringing an image of her ancestor along to those historic moments.
Palmer received recognition for her roles on Nickelodeon, such as portraying the titular character in the sitcom True Jackson, VP (2008–2011), providing the voice of Aisha in the Nickelodeon revival of Winx Club (2011–2014), and headlining the television film Rags (2012). Following her work in the musical drama film Joyful Noise (2012) and the animated adventure film Ice Age: Continental Drift (2012), Palmer made her transition to mature roles with the VH1 original biographical film CrazySexyCool: The TLC Story (2013), and subsequently starred in the thriller film Animal (2014), the comedy horror series Scream Queens (2015–2016), the drama series Berlin Station (2017–2019), the slasher series Scream (2019) and the crime drama film Hustlers (2019). In 2021, she received a Primetime Emmy Award for her roles in the series Keke Palmer’s Turnt Up with the Taylors.
We are highlighting examples of Black excellence throughout the year! Feel free to send us suggestions!
Lagos, South west, Nigeria
Damola Ayegbayo is an Experienced Visual Artist with a demonstrated history of working in the arts and crafts industry. Skilled in Paintings and Drawings. He aims to communicate the power and beauty of black African women, realities of life and morals, through colors and black beautiful women’s faces.
“ The name of my painting style is called ÀBÈFÉ meaning ( pleaded to be loved) which is my native name. my craft is an expressionism style of art, I use portraits of beautiful black women to speak to society about morals, good behavior, love, and unity. an image of a black beautiful woman always reminds me of how my strong mother trained and brought me up with love and good morals helping me to discover my real self, the concept of using a black woman is a great reference to my loving mother and the role Other women had played in my life, their importance and existence in the world can not be underestimated
He is inspired by his late grandfather that was a painter, sculptor, and ceramist from a tender age, as his love to practice art increased in the university by meeting with greater like minds in the department and visits many art galleries and art departments in other universities, also traveled to historic ancient cities and art workshop e.t.c.
We are highlighting examples of Black excellence throughout the year! Feel free to send us suggestions!
Valerie L. Thomas (born February 8, 1943) is an American scientist and inventor. She invented the illusion transmitter, for which she received a patent in 1980.[2] She was responsible for developing the digital media formats image processing systems used in the early years of the Landsat program.[3]
Early life and education
Thomas was born in Baltimore, Maryland.[4] Coming from an adverse background, she attended Morgan State University, where she was one of two women majoring in physics.[5] Thomas excelled in her mathematics and science courses at Morgan State University and was graduated with highest honors in 1964, with a degree in physics.[6] She went on to work for NASA.[7]
Career
Thomas began working for NASA as a data analyst in 1964.[8][9] She developed real-time computer data systems to support satellite operations control centers (1964–1970). She oversaw the creation of the Landsat program (1970–1981), becoming an international expert in Landsat data products. Her participation in this program expanded upon the works of other NASA scientists in the pursuit of being able to visualize Earth from space.[10]
In 1974, Thomas headed a team of approximately 50 people for the Large Area Crop Inventory Experiment (LACIE), a joint effort with the NASA Johnson Space Center, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and the U.S. Department of Agriculture. An unprecedented scientific project, LACIE demonstrated the feasibility of using space technology to automate the process of predicting wheat yield on a worldwide basis.[9]
She attended an exhibition in 1976 that included an illusion of a light bulb that appeared to be lit, even though it had been removed from its socket. The illusion, which involved another light bulb and concave mirrors, inspired Thomas. Curious about how light and concave mirrors could be used in her work at NASA, she began her research in 1977. This involved creating an experiment in which she observed how the position of a concave mirror would affect the real object that is reflected. Using this technology, she would invent the illusion transmitter.[5] On October 21, 1980,[8] she obtained the patent for the illusion transmitter, a device that NASA continues to use today. Thomas worked her way up to associate chief of the Space Science Data Operations Office at NASA.[11] Thomas’s invention was depicted in a children’s fictional book, television, and video games.[citation needed]
In 1985, Thomas was the NSSDC Computer Facility manager responsible for a major consolidation and reconfiguration of two previously independent computer facilities and infused them with new technology. She then served as the Space Physics Analysis Network (SPAN) project manager from 1986 to 1990 during a period when SPAN underwent a major reconfiguration and grew from a scientific network with approximately 100 computer nodes to one directly connecting approximately 2,700 computer nodes worldwide.
In 1990, SPAN became a major part of NASA’s science networking and today’s Internet.[9] She also participated in projects related to Halley’s Comet, ozone research, satellite technology, and the Voyager spacecraft.
She mentored countless numbers of students in the Mathematics Aerospace Research and Technology Inc. program.[12] Because of her unique career and commitment to giving something back to the community, Thomas had often spoken to groups of students from elementary school, secondary, college, and university ages, as well as adult groups. As a role model for potential young black engineers and scientists, she made hundreds of visits to schools and national meetings over the years. She has mentored many students working in summer programs at Goddard Space Flight Center. She also judged at science fairs, working with organizations such as the National Technical Association (NTA) and Women in Science and Engineering (WISE). These latter programs encourage minority and female students to pursue science and technology careers.[13]
At the end of August 1995, she retired from NASA and her positions of associate chief of the NASA Space Science Data Operations Office, manager of the NASA Automated Systems Incident Response Capability, and as chair of the Space Science Data Operations Office Education Committee.[9] Valerie Thomas is credited with being the TRUE creator of the 3D imagery
Retirement
After retiring, Thomas served as an associate at the UMBC Center for Multicore Hybrid Productivity Research.[14] She also continued to mentor youth through the Science Mathematics Aerospace Research and Technology, Inc. and the National Technical Association.[5]
Notable achievements
Throughout her career, Thomas held high-level positions at NASA including heading the Large Area Crop Inventory Experiment (LACIE) collaboration between NASA, NOAA, and USDA in 1974, serving as assistant program manager for Landsat/Nimbus (1975–1976), managing the NSSDC Computer Facility (1985), managing the Space Physics Analysis Network project (1986–1990), and serving as associate chief of the Space Science Data Operations Office. She authored many scientific papers and holds a patent for the illusion transmitter. Her invention was depicted in a children’s fictional book, television, and video games.[citation needed] For her achievements, Thomas has received numerous awards including the Goddard Space Flight Center Award of Merit and the NASA Equal Opportunity Medal.[12]
We are highlighting examples of Black excellence throughout the year! Feel free to send us suggestions!
Sunday, March 27
PHILADELPHIA — The original Cinderella run began with a transatlantic flight and discomfort.
Two lanky teens crammed into compact airplane seats and, as their high school classmates prepared to graduate, they jetted off to Mali. They’d go from there to Greece, and chase history at the under-19 basketball World Cup, but come on, some friends thought, who were they kidding?
Mali had never qualified for the Olympics or World Cup. No African team had ever medaled at a major international basketball tournament. Mali, Africa’s 19th most populous nation, had even struggled in continental competitions.
“If Canada play[s] Mali, or France play[s] Mali,” a couple friends told Hassan and Fousseyni Drame, “they’re gonna beat you guys by 50.”
But the Drame twins, who moved from Mali to New York in 2016, had developed a basketball worldview rooted in hope. They carried it with them across the Mediterranean Sea that summer. They helped stun Latvia, Canada and France en route to the U-19 World Cup final. As semifinal clocks struck zero, Fousseyni fell to his knees in prayer. Hassan bounded across the court in ecstasy.
Then they returned to the United States, and joined a men’s college basketball program coming off a 10-22 season. Saint Peter’s University, with decrepit facilities and one winning season in its past eight, had little reason to hope at the time. But the Drame twins would tell their new teammates, again and again: “We’re going to make a run.”
When anybody doubted their vision, they’d respond just as they did ahead of the World Cup, with three simple words: “Time will tell.”
Nowadays, he and his brother are fueling that run, as main characters in the drama that has captivated America. They’re high-energy forwards and fearless defenders who’ve corralled key rebounds in upsets of Kentucky, Murray State and Purdue.
Six years ago, though, they were high school underclassmen facing the toughest decisions of their lives.
They left family and friends, structure and comfort in West Africa to pursue basketball dreams at a tiny religious high school on Long Island. They knew three words of English, Hassan says — “OK,” “yes” and “no.”
They moved in with a host family. They dove into the most basic English-as-a-second-language books, with dedicated ESL teachers in small groups. They immersed themselves in American culture, which was initially shocking, but they learned. They flashed infectious smiles as they went.
They also grew as basketball players, and attracted the intrigued eyes of several programs, but there was a catch.
“They [were] a package deal,” St. Peter’s head coach Shaheen Holloway says. “These two guys [are connected] at the hip.”
Some schools recruited one but not the other. Some had only one available scholarship. Holloway had two, and had recruited both since they were juniors, so the twins committed to St. Peter’s.
After they starred at the U-19 World Cup, bigger programs came calling. “But we stayed faithful to St. Peter,” Hassan says. Because the program embodied an American cliché that the twins had adopted.
“We all have [a] chip on our shoulder,” Hassan explained last week. “We have one mentality: Whoever we’re playing, if they put their shoes on, and put a jersey [on], we do the same thing.” The names on jerseys don’t matter, Fousseyni agreed. When basketball begins, history becomes irrelevant.
“No matter what,” Hassan says, “one thing will not betray you: The work that you put in.”
The twins began trying to explain this even before the Kentucky upset. Hassan reiterated it earlier this week — “when we step on the court, it’s five versus five. They don’t have two heads. They don’t have four legs,” he told The Ringer — and again on Saturday.
“We don’t see height. We don’t see talent,” he said when asked about the imposing bigs the Peacocks had conquered in March. “With [all due] respect, I don’t even know who [7-foot-4 Purdue center Zach] Edey is.”
“It’s true,” Fousseyni confirmed. “We don’t really know those names. All we see is a player.”
Perhaps it helps that when they arrived in New York six years ago, Hassan says, they didn’t even know that college basketball existed. They hadn’t grown up on the mystique of Kentucky or North Carolina, their Sunday opponent. “I thought from high school, you just go to the NBA,” Hassan says.
He learned, of course, that “there’s this tournament … and it’s big-time.” He began to dream. Nowadays, thousands of Malians are dreaming with him. “The government is following it,” Hassan says. Phone calls come from “everybody,” from old friends to the president of Mali’s basketball federation.
But he isn’t overwhelmed by any of it. “This not my first time to experience stuff like that,” he says. The World Cup run, in a way, was even more improbable, “so I kinda expect it.”
He and his brother are now two-time Cinderellas, and the previous experience, Hassan says, “definitely” prepared them for this one. They relayed lessons to their teammates, both this week and “since the day we stepped on campus.”
They embraced that “nobody believed in” them, and applied “the same mindset we apply on the national team.”
They promised: “Time will tell.”
“The twins always said it,” senior KC Ndefo confirmed.
“It’s cool to see that they spoke that into existence,” classmate Doug Edert said last week. “And we’re here now, we’re going to make the most of it.”
We are highlighting examples of Black excellence throughout the year! Feel free to send us suggestions!
Black Violin is an American hip hop duo from Fort Lauderdale, Florida comprising two classically trained string instrumentalists, Kevin Sylvester and Wilner Baptiste, who go by the stage names Kev Marcus and Wil B. Kev Marcus plays the violin, and Wil B. plays the viola. For over a decade, the classical-meets-hip-hop duo has steadily built a devoted following — culminating in two sold-out shows at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts with the National Symphony Orchestra commemorating the 50th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s death.[citation needed]
They developed an act covering hip-hop songs on their violins, which became popular in local clubs. Two years after sending in a tape to Showtime at the Apollo, they were invited to appear on the show—which they won and kept winning.
They were approached by the manager of Alicia Keys, who asked them to perform with the singer on the Billboard Awards. Other offers followed—they toured with Mike Shinoda of Linkin Park, opened for the Wu-Tang Clan, composed the music for the Fox series Pitch. Individually and together, Wil and Kev have worked with Alessia Cara, 2 Chainz, and Lil Wayne. All the while, Black Violin continued touring, playing as many as 200 shows a year, and released two independent, self-financed albums before releasing the acclaimed Stereotypes in 2015.[1]
The duo currently performs with DJ SPS and drummer Nat Stokes.[2]
We are highlighting examples of Black excellence throughout the year! Feel free to send us suggestions!
Sarahbeth Maney also known as SB, is a 2021-22 New York Times photography fellow covering politics in Washington D.C.
Originally from the California Bay Area, her personal work focuses on education, disability, and issues that disproportionately impact Black and brown communities. As a journalist, her goal is to further representation within the industry and portray each story as honestly as it exists.
Maney received a bachelor’s degree in photojournalism from San Francisco State University in 2019, where she also served as The National Press Photographers Association chapter president. During that time, Maney interned at The San Francisco Chronicle, Flint Journal in Michigan and S.F. Examiner.
Most recently, she received a grant from the Pulitzer Center and Diversify Photo to continue documenting a story about pregnancy and housing insecurity during the coronavirus pandemic. Her work has appeared in The Washington Post, TIME, The Wall Street Journal, Vanity Fair, CNN, The Guardian, HuffPost, Bloomberg, Forbes, and among others. Inquiries and licensing: sbmaneyphoto@gmail.com+1 (925) 639-2654
Sarahbeth is covering the confirmation hearings of Ketanji Brown Jackson.
We are highlighting examples of Black excellence throughout the year! Feel free to send us suggestions!
Even before taking office, President Joe Biden pledged to reshape the federal judiciary. In a December 2020 letter, during his presidential transition, he asked Democratic senators to recommend public defenders and civil rights lawyers, who have generally been underrepresented on the federal bench, for judgeships. If the president nominates Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, who currently sits on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, to fill the vacancy left by the retirement of Justice Stephen Breyer, he will take his mission to diversify professional representation to the next level, putting a former federal public defender on the highest court in the land.
If nominated and confirmed, the 51-year-old Jackson would be the first Black woman on the court and also one of the youngest justices – second only to Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who celebrated her 50th birthday on Friday. She would bring a wide range of experiences not only as a public defender but also a federal district judge and a member of the U.S. Sentencing Commission. Jackson has earned high praise from the justice she would replace if nominated: When she was under consideration for her previous job as a federal trial court judge, Breyer described her as “brilliant,” a “mix of common sense” and “thoughtfulness.” And she might enjoy an edge over other candidates because of the prospect that she would have a relatively smooth path to confirmation: She was confirmed to an appellate judgeship less than a year ago with support from three Republican senators, and she is a relative by marriage of former House Speaker Paul Ryan, who ran for vice president on the Republican ticket in 2012.
Early life and career
A native Washingtonian, Jackson moved to Florida as a young child with her parents, graduates of historically Black colleges and universities who worked as public schoolteachers. Her father then went to law school, eventually becoming the chief attorney for the Miami-Dade County School Board. Her mother became an administrator and served as the principal at a public magnet school for 14 years.
Jackson attended Miami Palmetto High School, a public school whose other notable alumni include, according to the Miami Herald, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Vivek Murthy, the current U.S. surgeon general. While there, she was a stand-out debater and served as student body president.
She went on to Harvard College, from which she graduated magna cum laude in 1992, and Harvard Law School, graduating cum laude in 1996. She spent the year between college and law school as a reporter and researcher at Time magazine in New York.
In the 17 years following her graduation from law school, Jackson held a variety of legal jobs. She attained three federal clerkships, worked at four elite law firms, and served two stints with the Sentencing Commission. While much of that experience is typical for a Supreme Court short-lister, one line on Jackson’s resume is not: her mid-career decision to spend two years as a public defender. In fact, the last justice with significant experience representing criminal defendants was Justice Thurgood Marshall, who retired in 1991.
From 1996 to 1997, Jackson served as a clerk to U.S District Judge Patti Saris, a Massachusetts judge appointed by President Bill Clinton. She followed that clerkship with a second one, for Judge Bruce Selya, appointed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit by President Ronald Reagan, from 1997 to 1998.
Jackson then snagged a highly sought-after spot as an associate at Miller Cassidy Larroca & Lewin, a Washington litigation boutique that later merged with Baker Botts, a Texas-based firm. Other prominent alumni of the firm include Seth Waxman, who served as the solicitor general in the Clinton administration, former deputy attorney general Jamie Gorelick, and Barrett, who arrived at the firm, fresh off a clerkship with Justice Antonin Scalia, shortly after Jackson left.
Jackson left Miller Cassidy after a year for a third clerkship, this time at the Supreme Court as a clerk for Breyer. During the 1999-2000 term, the court was (much as it is now) mired in the culture wars, but often with different results. In Stenberg v. Carhart, for example, the court – in an opinion by Breyer – struck down a Nebraska law that banned so-called “partial birth” abortions, while in Santa Fe Independent School District v. Doe the court ruled that a school district’s policy of allowing student-led and student-initiated prayer at football games violates the Constitution’s establishment clause. But in Boy Scouts of America v. Dale, the court agreed with the Scouts that New Jersey could not force the group to accept a gay man as a scoutmaster.
When her clerkship ended, Jackson became an associate in the Boston office of a large law firm, Goodwin Procter. In 2001, in McGuire v. Reilly, she was one of the lawyers on a “friend of the court” brief supporting a Massachusetts law that created a floating “buffer zone” around pedestrians and cars approaching abortion clinics. Jackson’s clients included the Women’s Bar Association of Massachusetts, the League of Women Voters, the Abortion Access Project of Massachusetts, and the Massachusetts affiliate of NARAL Pro-Choice America. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit allowed the law to take effect, reasoning that the state legislature was “making every effort to restrict as little speech as possible while combating the deleterious secondary effects of anti-abortion protests.”
Jackson left Goodwin Procter in 2002 to become an associate at the firm then known as the Feinberg Group, now known as Feinberg Rozen. In a questionnaire for her 2021 confirmation to the D.C. Circuit, Jackson wrote that she worked on mediations and arbitrations while at the Feinberg Group but did not appear in court.
Jackson spent a year at the Feinberg Group before going to work as a staffer at the U.S. Sentencing Commission, an independent federal agency within the judiciary created by Congress in response to “widespread disparity in federal sentencing.” She spent two years there as assistant special counsel.
In 2005, Jackson became an assistant federal public defender in Washington, D.C. At her 2021 confirmation hearing, Jackson drew “a direct line” between her work as a public defender and her later work as a trial judge. She told senators that, during her time as a public defender, she was “struck” by how little her clients understood about the legal process, despite the obviously serious implications of criminal proceedings for their lives. As a result, Jackson said, as a trial judge she took “extra care” to make sure that defendants were aware of what was happening to them and why. “I think that’s really important for our entire justice system because it’s only if people understand what they’ve done, why it’s wrong, and what will happen to them if they do it again that they can really start to rehabilitate,” she emphasized. As a public defender, Jackson argued in the D.C. Circuit, including before some of the judges who would later become her colleagues.
Jackson also has a family member who was a defendant in the criminal justice system. As Ann Marimow and Aaron Davis reported for The Washington Post, while Jackson was working as a public defender she received a request for help from her distant uncle, Thomas Brown, who was serving a life sentence on federal drug charges. Jackson referred Brown to a Washington law firm, Wilmer Hale, which filed a clemency petition on Brown’s behalf. In 2016, President Barack Obama commuted Brown’s sentence, leading to his release at age 78 after over 25 years in prison.
In 2007, Jackson returned to private practice one last time. She became “of counsel” – a designation for lawyers who are neither associates nor partners – in the Washington office of Morrison & Foerster, a large San Francisco-based law firm. For three years, Jackson was part of the firm’s appellate litigation group, working on cases in the Supreme Court and in state and federal appeals courts around the country.
In 2010, she returned to the Sentencing Commission after Obama nominated her to serve as vice chair of the commission. The Senate confirmed her for the position by unanimous consent. During her tenure, the commission sought to alleviate harsh sentences for drug crimes by enacting several amendments to the Federal Sentencing Guidelines, including allowing some people with crack-cocaine convictions to seek lighter sentences.
A federal district judgeship
In September 2012, Obama nominated Jackson to serve as a U.S. district judge in Washington, D.C. Although the Senate held hearings in December, it did not act on her nomination before the 112th Congress adjourned at the beginning of January. Obama nominated Jackson again on Jan. 4, 2013, and the Senate confirmed her by a voice vote in March.
During her seven years as a district judge, Jackson issued several high-profile rulings on topics ranging from federal environmental law to the Americans with Disabilities Act. But none had a higher profile than her decision in Committee on the Judiciary v. McGahn, in which she ruled that Don McGahn, the former White House counsel to President Donald Trump, was required to testify before the House Judiciary Committee as part of its investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election and Trump’s possible obstruction of justice, even after Trump had directed him not to do so. In a 118-page opinion, Jackson rejected the contention by Trump’s Department of Justice that federal courts lack the power to review disputes between the executive branch and Congress over subpoenas, as well as its argument that the president has the sole authority to decide whether he and his senior aides will comply with subpoenas to testify about possible wrongdoing in his administration. She stressed that “the primary takeaway from the past 250 years of recorded American history is that Presidents are not kings.” White House employees, she continued, “work for the People of the United States,” and “take an oath to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States”; the president cannot block them from appearing to testify. McGahn eventually testified before the committee in June 2021, after the DOJ (now under the Biden administration) and the committee reached an agreement for him to do so.
In April 2018, Jackson ruled against the Trump administration in a lawsuit brought by federal employee unions challenging three of the president’s executive orders on the collective bargaining rights of federal workers. The unions argued that the orders exceeded the president’s powers and conflicted with both federal labor laws and the employees’ constitutional rights.
In a 62-page opinion, Jackson ruled for the challengers. She agreed with them both that she had the power to review their claims and that Trump’s “directives undermine federal employees’ right to bargain collectively as protected by” federal law.
The D.C. Circuit reversed Jackson’s holding that she had the power to review the union’s claims. The unions, Judge Thomas Griffith reasoned, must first pursue their challenge through an administrative agency process and then, if necessary, in the courts of appeals.
Jackson ruled for the Trump administration in Center for Biological Diversity v. McAleenan, a challenge to a decision by the Department of Homeland Security to waive over two dozen laws in connection with the construction of a 20-mile segment in New Mexico of the border wall with Mexico. The challenger, an environmental group, argued that the waiver exceeded the agency’s power and would cause environmental damage.
Jackson dismissed the group’s complaint, ruling that federal courts do not have the power to consider the group’s non-constitutional claims. Moreover, she continued, the group had not alleged the kind of facts that would allow their constitutional claims to move forward. The group asked the Supreme Court to take up their case, but the justices denied its petition for review in June 2020.
In 2015, Jackson ruled that prison employees and contractors in the District of Columbia had discriminated against William Pierce, a deaf man serving a 51-day sentence for assault, when they never tried to determine what accommodations he would need to communicate with others and “largely ignored his repeated requests for an interpreter.” Instead, she wrote, the employees and contractors “figuratively shrugged and effectively sat on their hands with respect to this plainly hearing-disabled person in their custody, presumably content to rely on their own uninformed beliefs about how best to handle him and certainly failing to engage in any meaningful assessment of his needs.” Jackson did not resolve, however, Pierce’s claim that prison officials had retaliated against him for his requests for an interpreter by placing him in solitary confinement, explaining that Pierce and the city disagreed on the underlying facts of the dispute. A jury later awarded Pierce $70,000 in damages, and the city did not appeal.
In October 2018, Jackson issued an important ruling in favor of the U.S. territory of Guam in a dispute with the U.S. Navy. The Navy had created a landfill on the island that was used for the disposal of munitions and chemicals. Because pollution from the landfill was contaminating a nearby river, the government of Guam entered an agreement with the Environmental Protection Agency to shut it down and clean it up. The clean-up was expensive, so Guam went to federal court, seeking help from the Navy to recover some of the costs – which could reach as much as $160 million.
The federal government asked Jackson to dismiss the case, arguing that Guam could only seek money from the government under one provision of the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation & Liability Act, and it was too late to do so. Jackson rejected the federal government’s argument, allowing the case to go forward.
A promotion to the country’s “second-highest court”
The D.C. Circuit is often dubbed the “second-highest court in the land” because of the many high-profile cases that it hears and because it has served as a launching pad for several Supreme Court justices. Among the current justices, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh all served on the D.C. Circuit before being nominated to the Supreme Court, as did the late Justices Antonin Scalia and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The work is not entirely glamorous, however: The court’s docket also includes a steady diet of lower-profile (although still important) administrative-law cases, including appeals of orders issued by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.
After Biden nominated Merrick Garland, then a judge on the D.C. Circuit, to be the attorney general, Jackson was quickly regarded as a leading contender to fill the vacancy left by Garland’s departure. And indeed, although she was not officially nominated until April 19, 2021, her responses to a questionnaire submitted before her confirmation indicated that White House Counsel Dana Remus contacted her on Jan. 26, 2021, about a possible nomination to the D.C. Circuit, and she met with the president in late February.
Jackson’s nomination for the D.C. Circuit enjoyed support from lawyers of all ideological stripes. Judge Thomas Griffith, a George W. Bush nominee who retired in 2020, wrote in a letter that although Jackson and he “have sometimes differed on the best outcome of a case,” he had “always respected her careful approach and agreeable manner.” And a letter signed by 23 lawyers who clerked at the Supreme Court at the same time as Jackson (for both liberal and conservative justices) emphasized the attorneys’ “great respect for her legal abilities, her work ethic, and her ability to work with colleagues of both like and differing views.” The letter also noted that Jackson “treated everyone who worked at the Court with respect and kindness.”
At her confirmation hearing in April 2021, Jackson faced questions about her service from 2010 to 2011 on the board of Montrose Christian School, a Maryland private school that has since closed. Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., noted that the school’s statement of faith indicated that “[w]e should speak on behalf of the unborn and contend for the sanctity of all human life from conception to natural death” and that marriage should be limited to a man and a woman. Hawley noted that Barrett had been “attacked” for serving on the board of a Christian school with similar positions, and he asked Jackson whether, based on her service at Montrose Christian, she believed in “the principle, and the constitutional right, of religious liberty.”
“I do believe in religious liberty,” Jackson told Hawley. It is, she said, a “foundational tenet of our entire government.” But Jackson distanced herself from the Montrose Christian statement of faith, telling Hawley that she had “served on many boards” and did not “necessarily agree with all of the statements … that those boards might have in their materials.” And in this case, she added, she “was not aware of” the statement of beliefs.
Jackson was confirmed on June 14, 2021, by a vote of 53-44. Three Republicans – Susan Collins of Maine, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska – joined all Democrats in voting for her.
In her short tenure on the D.C. Circuit, Jackson has already been involved in one high-profile case: Trump’s efforts to block the release of documents related to the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol. The special House of Representatives committee investigating the riot asked the National Archives to turn over presidential records relating to the events of Jan. 6 and Trump’s claims of election fraud in the 2020 presidential election.
When the archivist notified Trump that he would turn over records, Trump claimed executive privilege over some of the documents, including diaries, schedules, and visitor and call logs. But Biden countered that the documents should not be shielded by executive privilege, prompting Trump to go to court. A federal district judge in Washington rejected Trump’s request to block the disclosure of the documents, and the D.C. Circuit, in an opinion by Judge Patricia Millett that Jackson joined, upheld that ruling. Trump then went to the Supreme Court, which on Jan. 19 turned down Trump’s request to stop the release of the documents. Only Justice Clarence Thomas indicated that he disagreed with the court’s decision.
Personal life
Jackson met her husband, a surgeon at MedStar Georgetown University Hospital, while both were students at Harvard. The couple married in 1996, and they have two daughters – one a senior in high school and the other in college.
Jackson was introduced at her 2012 confirmation hearing by Paul Ryan, then a member of the House of Representatives and Mitt Romney’s running mate in the 2012 presidential campaign. Ryan is a relative of Jackson by marriage: His wife’s sister, Dana, is married to William Jackson, the twin brother of Jackson’s husband, Patrick Jackson. Ryan told the Senate Judiciary Committee that, although “our politics may differ,” his “praise for Ketanji’s intellect, for her character, for her integrity, it is unequivocal.”
During Jackson’s 2012 confirmation hearing, Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, asked her whether, as a district court judge, she planned “to follow Justice Breyer’s very awesome style of questioning [at] oral argument in your court.” After the laughter subsided, Jackson responded that she did not think anyone could match Breyer’s style, and she didn’t know whether she would “even attempt to try.” Although Breyer’s unique approach to oral arguments may not have been well suited to the district court, if nominated to succeed him on the Supreme Court Jackson could decide whether to imitate him there – or, is as more likely, bring her own style, reflecting her own personality and experiences.
We are highlighting examples of Black excellence throughout the year! Feel free to send us suggestions!
Dr. Dorothy Lavinia Brown was a medical pioneer, educator, and community leader. In 1948-1949 Brown became the first African American female appointed to a general surgery residency in the de jure racially segregated South. In 1956 Brown became the first unmarried woman in Tennessee authorized to be an adoptive parent, and in 1966 she became the first black woman representative to the state legislature in Tennessee.
Brown was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on January 7, 1919. Within weeks after she was born, Brown’s unmarried mother Edna Brown moved to upstate New York and placed her five-month-old baby daughter in the predominantly white Troy Orphan Asylum (later renamed Vanderhyden Hall) in Troy, New York. Brown was a demonstrably bright child, and became interested in medicine after she had a tonsillectomy at age five.
When Brown was 13 years old her estranged mother reclaimed her. Subsequently, however, Brown would run away from her mother five times, returning to the orphanage each time. During her teenage years Brown worked at a Chinese laundry, and also as a mother’s helper for Mrs. W.F. Jarrett, who encouraged her desire to become a physician. At age 15, the last time Brown ran away from her mother, she enrolled herself at Troy High School. Realizing that Brown had no place to stay, the principal arranged for Brown to live with Lola and Samuel Wesley Redmon, foster parents who became a major influence in her life and from whom Brown received the security and support she needed until she graduated at the top of her high school class in 1937. Awarded a four-year scholarship by the Troy Conference Methodist Women, in 1941 Brown graduated second in her class from Bennett College in Greensboro, North Carolina.
During World War II Brown worked as an inspector for the Army Ordnance Department in Rochester, New York. In 1944 Brown began studying medicine at the Meharry Medical College in Nashville, Tennessee, receiving her Medical Degree in 1948. After serving a year-long residency internship at Harlem Hospital in New York City, Brown returned to Meharry’s George Hubbard Hospital in 1949 for her five-year residency, becoming Professor of Surgery in 1955.
In the mid-1950s an unmarried patient of Brown’s pleaded with her to adopt her newborn daughter, and in 1956 Brown became the first known single woman to adopt a child in the state of Tennessee. As a tribute to her foster mother, Brown named her daughter Lola Denise Brown.
From 1966 to 1968 Brown served in the Tennessee House of Representatives, where she introduced a controversial bill to reform the state’s abortion law to allow legalized abortions in cases of incest and rape. Brown also co-sponsored legislation that recognized Negro History Week, which later expanded to Black History Month.
Brown served as Nashville Riverside Hospital’s Chief of Surgery and as Meharry’s Clinical Professor of Surgery from 1959 until 1983. In 1982 Brown also consulted for the National Institutes of Health.
In 1970 the Dorothy L. Brown Women’s Residence at Meharry Medical College was named in her honor. In 1993 Brown received a humanitarian award from the Carnegie Foundation for her work on behalf of women, children, and health. In 1994 Brown received the prestigious Horatio Alger Award.
On June 13, 2004, in Nashville, Tennessee, Dr. Dorothy L. Brown died of congestive heart failure. She was 85 years old.
