US Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson to Speak at A&T Sept. 3

EAST GREENSBORO, N.C. (Aug. 22, 2025) – The Hon. Ketanji Brown Jackson, the first African American woman to serve on the Supreme Court of the United States, will speak at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, America’s largest and leading historically Black university, on Wednesday, Sept. 3, N.C. A&T announced today.

The event, which is restricted to N.C. A&T students, faculty and staff, will be held in N.C. A&T’s Harrison Auditorium beginning at 6 p.m. Students and employees should monitor their university e-mail on Monday, Aug. 25, for a link to reserve their tickets.

Justice Jackson is touring the nation in support of her acclaimed memoir, “Lovely One” (Penguin Random House, 2024). The book, which tells her life story culminating in her 2022 appointment to the Supreme Court, topped the New York Times bestseller list shortly after it was released last fall and continues to rank highly on Amazon’s Black & African American Biographies and Women’s Biographies lists.   

Justice Jackson grew up in Miami, where she graduated from public high school before going on to Harvard for both her B.A. in government and J.D. from Harvard Law School, which she earned cum laude.

Her rich career includes clerking for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, serving as a federal public defender and working for two private law firms. President Barack Obama nominated her to the U.S. Sentencing Commission in 2009 and then as a U.S. district judge for the District of Columbia in 2013.

After eight years on that court, she was nominated to the U.S. Court of Appeals in 2021 by President Joe Biden and confirmed in a bipartisan vote. The following year, he nominated her to the U.S. Supreme Court, and she was once again confirmed in a bipartisan vote.

At 54, she is one of the youngest members of the high court. She is married to Dr. Patrick Graves Jackson, a surgeon whom she met while they were classmates at Harvard. The couple have two daughters.

At North Carolina A&T, she will speak to a university community that has spawned its own legal historical figures, including the Hon. Henry Frye ‘53, the first Black chief justice of the North Carolina Supreme Court, the late Hon. Elreta Alexander-Ralston ’37, the first Black woman to practice law in North Carolina, as well as its first elected Black judge, and the Hon. Shirley Fulton ‘77, the first Black female prosecutor in Mecklenburg County. Those legal pioneers and more all called A&T alma mater, even though the university does not have a law school.