Born in Washington, D.C., and raised in Miami, Florida, Ketanji Onyika Brown Jackson was raised by her parents, Johnny Brown, a lawyer, and Ellery Brown, a school principal. Her parents wanted to honor their ancestry and asked a relative serving in the Peace Corps in West Africa for a list of African names for their daughter. The name they selected, Ketanji Onyika, means "lovely one."
Despite excelling in school, being nominated the “mayor” of her high school and earning the designation of “most likely to succeed,” Justice Brown Jackson’s guidance counselor discouraged her from setting her sights on Harvard University. Notwithstanding the discouragement from her counselor, Justice Brown Jackson attended Harvard University for college and law school, where she served as an editor of the Harvard Law Review. Prior to law school, she spent a year working for Time magazine and serving as an intern for the Neighborhood Defender Service of Harlem.
Justice Brown Jackson began her legal career with three clerkships, including one with U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Stephen Breyer. Prior to her elevation to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, she served as a district judge for the United States District Court for the District of Columbia from 2013 to 2021. Justice Brown Jackson was also vice chair of the United States Sentencing Commission from 2010 to 2014. Since 2016, she has been a member of the Harvard Board of Overseers.
Justice Brown Jackson and her husband, Patrick, have two daughters: Talia and Leila. In 2016, Leila wrote a letter to President Obama recommending her mother for the Supreme Court vacancy that was a result of Justice Antonin Scalia’s death.
Nominated by President Joe Biden in 2021, Justice Brown Jackson succeeded Justice Breyer upon his retirement from the court on June 30, 2022. Upon her swearing in, she became the first Black woman and the first former federal public defender to serve on the Supreme Court.
After her confirmation, Justice Brown Jackson was quoted as saying the following: “It has taken 232 years and 115 prior appointments for a Black woman to be selected to serve on the Supreme Court of the United States, but we've made it! We've made it — all of us."
This text is excerpted from: https://www.biography.com/law-figure/ketanji-brown-jackson,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ketanji_Brown_Jackson and https://people.com/politics/ketanji-brown-jackson-most-inspiring-quotes/.
Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune was born in 1875 in a small log cabin on a rice and cotton farm in South Carolina. She was the fifteenth of seventeen children born to Sam and Patsy (McIntosh) McLeod, both former slaves.
Her parents wanted to be independent, so they sacrificed to buy a farm for the family. As a child, Dr. McLeod Bethune observed that the only difference between herself and white children was the ability to read and write. She set out to change that by learning as much as she could.
When Dr. McLeod Bethune began attending her town’s one-room schoolhouse for Black children; she was the only child in her family to attend school. She would go home from school each day and teach her family what she had learned each day.
Dr. McLeod Bethune attended Scotia Seminary (now Barber-Scotia College) and later Dwight L. Moody's Institute for Home and Foreign Missions in Chicago (now the Moody Bible Institute), hoping to become a missionary in Africa. However, she was told that Black missionaries were not needed.
Dr. McLeod Bethune and her husband Albertus Bethune married in 1898. Together they had a son named Albert.
Dr. Bethune started the Daytona Literary and Industrial Training Institute for Negro Girls in 1904 with $1.50, vision, an entrepreneurial mindset, resilience, and faith in God. She created “pencils” from charred wood, ink from elderberries, and mattresses from moss-stuffed corn sacks. Her first students were five little girls and her five-year-old son, Albert Jr. In less than two years, the school grew to 250 students. Recognizing the health disparities and lack of medical treatment available to African Americans in Daytona Beach, she also founded the Mary McLeod Hospital and Training School for Nurses, which at the time was the only school of its kind that served African American women on the East coast.
Daytona Institute would continue to increase in popularity, and merged with the Cookman Institute of Jacksonville, Florida in 1923 and became Bethune-Cookman College.
Tireless, talented and committed to service, Dr. Bethune held leadership positions in several prominent organizations even while also leading her school. In 1935, she founded the National Council of Negro Women, which would become a highly influential organization with a clear civil rights agenda.
She was appointed by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to the National Youth Administration in 1936. By 1939 she was the organization’s Director of Negro Affairs, which oversaw the training of tens of thousands of Black youth. She was the only female member of President Roosevelt’s influential “Black Cabinet.” She leveraged her close friendship with First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt to lobby for integrating the Civilian Pilot Training Program and to bring the Program to the campuses of historically Black colleges and universities, which became the alma maters of some of the first Black pilots in the country.
This text is excerpted from: https://www.cookman.edu/history/our-founder.html and
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_McLeod_Bethune. To read more about Dr. McLeod Bethune’s life and legacy, visit those websites, as well as: https://www.biola.edu/talbot/ce20/database/mary-mcleod-bethune. To view footage and hear one of her most notable speeches, visit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npy6NFFahes and
Charlotta Amanda Spears Bass was born on February 14, 1874, to Hiram and Kate Spears in either Sumter, South Carolina or Little Compton, Rhode Island. Upon graduation from high school, she enrolled in Pembroke College, a women's college which is now part of Brown University. When she was twenty years old she began working for the Providence Watchman, a local Black newspaper, and remained there for about ten years.
Bass later moved to Los Angeles, California and began working for $5 a week as an “office girl” at a newspaper that was then called The Eagle. The paper’s office was nestled on Central Avenue, the “Black belt of the city” as The Eagle described it — a neighborhood full of churches, clubs and Black-owned businesses, and home to the West Coast jazz scene.
When the editor John J. Neimore became ill, he asked Bass to take over the operations of the newspaper. Shortly after Neimore's death, Bass learned that "this Black-founded newspaper was owned by a white man, who offered his support only if [she] would become his 'sweetheart.'” Rather than take him up on his offer, Bass borrowed $50 from a local store owner to purchase the deed, becoming the first African-American woman to own and operate a newspaper in the United States. She renamed the newspaper The California Eagle due to increasing social and political issues in the region.
Early on, Bass hired an experienced editor from The Topeka Plaindealer, J.B. Bass, who served as the managing editor of the paper. He would soon become her husband. As joint publishers, they grew The California Eagle into the most widely circulated Black newspaper on the West Coast with a circulation of 60,000.
The newspaper served as a source of both information and inspiration for the Black community, which was often ignored or negatively portrayed by the predominantly white press. It illuminated Black life in a way that was not illuminated in other papers, covering issues such as housing rights, labor rights, voting rights, and police brutality. It is also credited as pioneering multiethnic politics through its advocacy of Asian-American and Mexican-American civil rights in the 1940s.
Bass entered politics in the 1940s, running for the Los Angeles City Council under the slogan “Don’t Fence Me In” — the title of a popular song of that era that she repurposed to condemn housing discrimination. She had been a longtime Republican, but voted for President Franklin D. Roosevelt, a Democrat, in 1936. She later denounced both parties for neglecting Black and women’s rights. She helped found the Independent Progressive Party of California in 1947, and pitched an unsuccessful bid for Congress in 1950.
Bass sold the newspaper in 1951 and co-founded Sojourners for Truth and Justice, a Black women’s group. In 1952, Bass became the first African-American woman nominated for Vice President, as a candidate of the Progressive Party. She was the running mate of lawyer Vincent Hallinan and their bid was launched on a platform of “peace and prosperity.” Though Bass did not win, she made history.
Bass retired to what was then a Black resort town southeast of Los Angeles, Lake Elsinore. During her retirement years, she maintained a community library in her garage for the young people in her neighborhood. It was a continuation of her long fight to give all people opportunities and education.
Considering the sum of her career as she was completing her autobiography, Forty Years (1960), Bass wrote: “It has been a good life that I have had, though a very hard one, but I know the future will be even better. And as I think back I know that is the only kind of life: In serving one's fellow man one serves himself best …”
To learn more about Mrs. Bass’ tremendous life and legacy, please visit: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/04/obituaries/charlotta-bass-vice-president-overlooked.html, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlotta_Bass, and https://laist.com/news/la-history/charlotta-bass-first-woman-of-color-to-run-for-us-vice-president. To view footage of Mrs. Bass, please visit: https://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/charlotta-spears-bass-first-black-woman-vp-nominee-epkd15/15441/.
