Judge Kentanji Brown Jackson herself didn't graduate from or teach at an HBCU, but the first Black woman to be nominated to the U.S. Supreme Court is the daughter of HBCU grads. Her father,  Johnny Brown, is a graduate of North Carolina Central University.  And since her historic nomination comes during the last few days of Black History Month, we would be remiss not to mention her.

Of 115 U.S. Supreme Court Justices in history, five have been women and three have been people of color -- two Black men, and one Latina woman. In addition to being the first Black woman on the court, if confirmed, Judge Jackson will be the If confirmed, Judge Jackson will be the first former public defender to join the court; the path to federal court judge usually runs through the prosecutor's office. She was appointed by President Barack Obama to serve on the U.S. Sentencing Commission, where she helped to lead efforts to reduce racist sentencing disparities for drug-related offenses. 

In high school, she was a debate team champion -- opposing debaters always feared seeing her come their way -- and a national champion in oratory. In her high school yearbook, she wrote that she wanted to go into law and eventually have a judicial appointment. Mission. Accomplished. 

She is expected to bring perspective around how people are impacted by judicial rulings to the court; in her time as a public defender, she was shocked by how little people knew about the law, and when she returned to the judgeship, she spent a lot of time trying to make sure people understood the impact of the law from the bench.

Discussion Questions

Young Students (K3-2nd Grade)
Judge Jackson said her father was her first real-life role model; he'd left his job as a teacher to go back to law school when she was a little girl. Who are your role models? In what ways do they inspire you?

Middle Students (Grades 3-8)
When Judge Jackson was 17, a drama teacher told her she probably wouldn't get a role she wanted in a play, because that character was meant to be white. When she was a senior in high school, her counselors told her she shouldn't try to go to Harvard and should instead set her sights a little lower. Have you ever been discouraged from chasing your dreams or interests by the adults around you? Has it impacted your dreams or what you've wanted to do?   

High School Students (Grades 9-12)
Judge Jackson wrote in her high school yearbook that she wanted have a legal career and a judicial appointment when she grew up, and she did exactly what she said she was going to do. She also says her high school extracurriculars, particularly debate, prepared her for her future in law. What are you doing now to prepare you for the things you want in life? What do you consider the right balance between working hard and enjoying the time you have to be young?

For Educators/Adults
Often, teachers and other adults in students' lives can stifle students' growth with low expectations rooted in implicit bias. Think about the expectations that you have for your students. Are they the same for everyone? If not, what factors determine your different levels of expectations? How are you encouraging all of your students to dream big and shoot for the moon?

Anna Julia Cooper was an educator and a Black liberation activist, fighting for both the liberation of the race and of women. She is known even today as one of the most prominent Black scholars in U.S. history. She was an alumna of St. Augustine's, a former faculty member at both St. Aug's and Wilberforce University, and a woman of Alpha Kappa Alpha.

She and classmate Mary Church Terrell were the first Black women to earn a master's degree, and she later became one of the first four Black women to receive a Ph.D. Like Dr. Terrell, Dr. Cooper also taught in the language department at the M Street School (now Paul Laurence Dunbar High School) in Washington, D.C., the city's first public high school for Blacks. She favored  an education "designed to prepare eligible students for higher education and leadership," which caused some conflict among those preferring an education that favored teaching Black children trades. Later in life, Dr. Cooper served as president of Frelinghuysen University, a school founded to provide classes for D.C. residents who lacked access to higher education. 

In the fight for liberation, she was critical of Black men for celebrating opportunities for racial progress that were not open to Black women, such as the right to vote, which Black men received in 1870, but Black women would not receive until the Voting Right Act of 1965, one year after Dr. Cooper's death. She was just as vocal a critic of leaders of the women’s movement for permitting an environment of racism. White women in the U.S. won the right to vote in 1920, underscoring Dr. Cooper's argument that neither movement considered the needs of Black women.

Dr. Carter G. Woodson is dubbed "the father of Black History," not just because he is the one who lobbied for the celebration of Negro History Week (now Black History Month), but because as an historical, author, journalist and founder of both the  Association for the Study of African American Life and History and the Journal of Negro History (both while serving as a dean at Howard University), he literally spent his entire career trying to advance the nation's understanding of Black history. He was a member of Omega Psi Phi, and a dean at both Howard and West Virginia Collegiate Institute (now West Virginia State University). 

Dr. Woodson believed that if both white and Black people learned Black history, it would reduce racial prejudice; racial prejudice, he believed, "is merely the logical result of tradition, the inevitable outcome of thorough instruction to the effect that the Negro has never contributed anything to the progress of mankind."He was frustrated that the contributions of Black people in the United States  "were overlooked, ignored, and even suppressed by the writers of history textbooks and the teachers who use them,"  and dedicated his life to lobbying for a more inclusive history. 

Following the "Red Summer" massacres of 1919 and leading into the Harlem Renaissance and an awakening of Black thought and culture, Dr. Woodson was considered to be one of the most important community leaders of the time because of his dedication to uncovering and preserving "lost history" -- or, rather, history that racists of the time were seeking to destroy, like that of the successful Black towns and business districts around the country that had been burned and terrorized, including Tulsa's Black Wall Street.

Dr. Woodson pioneered the idea that the field of Black history and Black studies should be owned and advanced by Black scholars who are able to "think Black." While he welcomed the interest of white scholars, he believed in letting the people with the lived experience of being Black in America be the experts on Blackness.

Discussion Questions

Young Students (K3-2nd Grade)
Dr. Carter G. Woodson believed history was a really important subject to help people get along. What do you know about your family's history? Who are the members of your family? What experiences have they had that make them who they are? ​

Middle Students (Grades 3-8)
Dr. Woodson believed that if other races better understood the history and accomplishments of Black people in America that it would eliminate racism. Do you agree or disagree with the idea that racism can be solved by better understanding the culture and history of others? Why?

High School Students (Grades 9-12)
Dr. Woodson once said, "If a race has no history, if it has no worthwhile tradition, it becomes a negligible factor in the thought of the world, and it stands in danger of being exterminated." Given this, and given his thoughts about the relationship between racism and learning history, why do you think there are efforts to erase the histories of Black, Indigenous, and Latino Americans in this country? Do you think those who seek to erase difficult but meaningful history understand the threat they are posing to the people who are being erased?

For Educators/Adults
There is often a frustration for Black people and other people of color in majority environments around "who gets to be the expert"? Even when they have the same credentials as white colleagues or classmates, implicit bias often paints Black and Brown people as being of lesser intelligence than white and Asian colleagues. In what ways are you working in your classroom and school to center the expertise of people whose lived experience differs from yours, especially on topics relating to diversity and the history and culture of diverse people?

Zora Neale Hurston was born in Alabama in 1891. When she was three, her family moved to Eatonville, Florida, one of the first all-Black towns incorporated in the United States, and the nation's first Black planned community. But it was in 1901 when she was first given books by a group of school teachers visiting Eatonville from up North that Hurston says she was really born -- she'd experienced a literary awakening that opened her eyes to the world. She later claimed 1901 as her birth year to gain free admission to Morgan College, the high school division of Morgan State University in Baltimore. She went on to study at Howard University, where she was co-founded The Hilltop, the student newspaper that still runs today, and was one of the earliest initiates of Zeta Phi Beta sorority.

Ms. Hurston was a revered anthropologist and ethnogropher; her time spent in a thriving all-Black town as a child allowed her to explore the complexities of stories of Black folks from different places in the South, as well as Africa and the Caribbean. She was known for her research on Hoodoo, She was also an important figure of the Harlem Renaissance, joining forces with Langston Hughes and Wallace Thurman to propel the voices of young artists forward. Her most famous work is Their Eyes Were Watching God, but in 1927, she interviewed Cudjoe Kazzola Lewis of Africatown, Alabama, who was the last known survivor of the enslaved Africans carried aboard Clotilda, an illegal slave ship that had entered the U.S. after the abolition of the Transatlantic slave trade on a bet -- just to see if the smugglers could get away with it. Publishers refused to publish Barracoon, the story about Cudjoe, because they wanted Hurston to change the language to reflect standard American English, but Hurston believed it was important to tell the story in Cudjoe's own voice.

Ralph Ellison only published one novel in his lifetime, Invisible Man, but he is considered one of the most important and prolific writers in Black history. Ellison's satirical skills were said to be sharpened at Tuskegee Institute. A bit ironic, since he was only admitted after an initial rejection because the institution needed a trumpet player and Ellison happened to play several musical instruments, including the cornet, piano and trumpet. Ellison studied music, and as much as he loved jazz, he really dreamed of being a classical composer.

His father died when Ellison was young, but had a love of literature that he passed on; he'd hoped his son would grow up to be a poet. Instead, he became a novelist who commiserated with Langston Hughes and Romare Bearden and Richard Wright (with whom he had a complicated romantic relationship) -- the Black arts elite -- in Harlem. Edison read all of the classic authors, but was more than an avid reader; he was a student of literature. It was from reading Hemingway, for example, that he learned how to hunt, a skill that would help him survive and make a living during a rough period in his life. He studied music and sculpting, was a professional photographer, and loved taking things apart. In many ways, he fully embodied the idea of the renaissance that was unfolding in Harlem among his contemporaries -- he was a fierce defender of Black culture moreso than race; “Ellison knew that race was built on surface perceptions that hid deeper human meaning and identities derived from culture,” one writer said of him.

He was admitted to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, awarded two President's Medals (from Lyndon Johnson and Ronald Reagan) and was the first member of the Century Association, a prestigious social club primarily associated with distinction in literature or the arts.​

Myrlie Evers-Williams, like many of the other women of the Civil Rights era, has a legacy in the movement that extends past the death of her husband, Medgar (who served as Mississippi's first NAACP field secretary). She met her husband at Alcorn A&M College (now Alcorn State University), and returned years later as a a distinguished scholar-in-residence at the university. She is a woman of Delta Sigma Theta, and a lifelong champion for civil rights.

First Black female commissioner on the Los Angeles Board of Public Works, served as chair of the board of the NAACP and was responsible for helping to revive the finances and reputation of the imperiled organization. Like others of her time, she was told she couldn't be head of the NAACP, a position she assumed in 1995, because she was a woman. Though the years had passed, times hadn't much changed from when women in different periods of the fight for equality were still facing dual challenges of being Black and woman.

In 2013, she became the first woman and the first non-clergy member in history to deliver the invocation at a U.S. Presidential inauguration, when she prayed at the second inauguration of former President Barack Obama.

Though retired from public life, Mrs. Ever-Williams remains committed to the cause of advancing Civil Rights. After George Floyd was killed in 2020, she said she was disheartened to see that "Even though thousands of us have worked for many years to see positive change in America, it seems that we may be in a backward trend." ​