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.”
“[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.
“Jones highlights the irony of the situation even further when she notes that at the very moment that Thomas Jefferson penned the self-evident truths of the Declaration of Independence, a black relative a slave had been brought into his office to serve him,” Jackson continued.
