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In Birmingham, Justice Jackson implores Americans not to ignore the 'darkest parts of our past' [1]
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Date: 2023-09-16
Instead, following in the footsteps of Justice Thurgood Marshall, the first Black man to serve on the high court, our first Black female Supreme Court justice spent Friday delivering the keynote speech at a civil rights event in Birmingham, Alabama.
Just weeks before the Oct. 2 start of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2023 term, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wasn’t vacationing on some billionaire’s yacht. Nor did she choose to make a public appearance, as many of her fellow Supreme Court justices often do, at a law school, judicial conference, or Federalist Society event.
Jackson spoke from the pulpit of the 16th Street Baptist Church to hundreds of people on the 60th anniversary of one of the most painful chapters in the history of the civil rights movement.
On Sept. 15, 1963, a Ku Klux Klan-affiliated group planted dynamite in the largest Black church in the city, killing four young Black girls attending sunday school: 14-year-olds Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, and Carole Roberston, and 11-year-old Cynthia Wesley. Dozens more parishioners were injured.
It would be decades before three white supremacists would see justice.
Here’s a brief—just over two minutes—recap of the Birmingham church bombing, and its aftermath, courtesy of the Voices of the Civil Rights Movement channel on YouTube.
x YouTube Video
Jackson, 53, grew up in Florida and attended public schools there; she delivered a stirring rebuke to those who are trying to sanitize or erase Black history lessons from public schools across the country, lest such lessons make white children feel bad.
“If we’re going to continue to move forward as a nation we cannot allow concerns about discomfort to displace knowledge, truth or history,” Jackson said. “It is certainly the case that parts of this country’s story can be hard to think about. I know that atrocities like the one we’re memorializing today are difficult to remember and relive. But I also know that it is dangerous to forget them.” “We cannot forget because the uncomfortable lessons are often the ones that teach us the most about ourselves,” she added. “We cannot forget because we cannot learn from past mistakes we do not know exist.”
Jackson’s speech came less than three months after she delivered a blistering dissent to the Supreme Court decision rejecting affirmative action in college admissions programs, calling the ruling by the conservative majority “truly a tragedy for us all.”
And she spoke in a state where the legislature has been considering a bill that would prohibit the teaching of “divisive concepts” in public schools. Would that include the Birmingham church bombing?
At the beginning of her speech, Brown noted that this was her first-ever trip ever to Alabama, and she felt strongly motivated to accept the speaking invitation.
“I have also come to Alabama to bring a message about what it is going to take … to ensure that those core constitutional values withstand these times. In a nutshell, I’ve come to Alabama to commemorate and mourn; celebrate and warn,” she said. ““I felt in my spirit that I had to come.”
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https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/9/16/2193656/-In-Birmingham-Justice-Jackson-implores-Americans-not-to-ignore-the-darkest-parts-of-our-past
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