Posted on March 22, 2022

Biden Supreme Court Nominee Jackson Praised NYT’s 1619 Project During MLK Day Speech

Jessica Chasmar, Fox News, March 17, 2022

Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, President Biden’s Supreme Court nominee, praised the controversial 1619 Project and its author Nikole Hannah-Jones during a Martin Luther King, Jr. Day address at the University of Michigan two years ago.

In a January 2020 lecture, titled, “Black Women Leaders In The Civil Rights Movement Era And Beyond,” Jackson described Hannah-Jones as an “acclaimed investigative journalist” and highlighted Hannah-Jones’ “provocative” assertion that “the America that was born in 1776 was not the perfect union that it purported to be.”

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“[A]cclaimed investigative journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones (who happens to be a black woman) explains that the men who drafted and enacted the Constitution founded this nation on certain ideals: freedom; equality; democracy,” Jackson said at the time. “Yet, at the time they formulated these principles, the institution of slavery already existed in the colonies — ever since the year 1619, when 20-to-30 Africans who had been captured in their homeland arrived in the colonies by ship and were exchanged for goods.

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She added, “Thus, it is Jones’s provocative thesis that the America that was born in 1776 was not the perfect union that it purported to be, and that it is actually only through the hard work, struggles, and sacrifices of African Americans over the past two centuries that the United States has finally become the free nation that the Framers initially touted.”

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During the same 2020 lecture, Jackson cited the late Derrick Bell, whose works influenced the creation of CRT, and said his 1993 book, “Faces At The Bottom Of The Well: The Permanence Of Racism,” was an important part of her childhood.

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