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Watch: Ketanji Brown Jackson shares the message she received from a stranger in Harvard Yard
“I hope to inspire people to try to follow this path, because I love this country. Because I love the law. Because I think it is important that we all invest in our future.”
Supreme Court nominee Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s voice was filled with emotion on Wednesday when she was asked to speak directly to young people across the country who may be doubting themselves as they think of their own futures.
Speaking through tears, the alum of Harvard University and Harvard Law School said in response to California Sen. Alex Padilla that she often speaks to young people.
“I hope to inspire people to try to follow this path, because I love this country,” she said. “Because I love the law. Because I think it is important that we all invest in our future. And the young people are the future, and so I want them to know that they can do and be anything.”
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Jackson, who is the first Black woman to be nominated for the court, said she wanted to tell young people what a stranger once told her as she was walking through Harvard Yard during her freshman year of college.
She said having attended public school, she didn’t know anything about Harvard until she visited for a speech competition when in high school.
She found Harvard to be “so different” once she arrived on the campus as a freshman.
“I’m from Miami, Florida,” she said. “Boston is very cold. It was — it was rough. It was different from anything I’d known. There were lots of students who were prep school kids, like my husband, who knew all about Harvard. And that was not me. And I think the first semester I was really homesick. I was really questioning, ‘Do I belong here? Can I make it in this environment?’
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“And I was walking through the yard in the evening and a Black woman I did not know was passing me on the sidewalk,” Jackson continued. “And she looked at me. And I guess she knew how I was feeling, and she leaned over as we crossed and said, ‘Persevere.’
“I would tell them to persevere,” she said.
Watch her full answer below:
Information from the Associated Press was used in this report.
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