I was so sad to learn of the death of Lilly Ledbetter, a leader of the movement for pay equity. She was moved by her own story to fight for equal pay regardless of gender first for herself, and then for all women.
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Issue 272 — September 9, 2024
I had eagerly awaited the publication of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s memoir, Lovely One, since I learned that my talented friend Jamia Wilson, Vice President/Executive Editor at Penguin Random House, secured the plum of editing the book.
Finally, the book launched on September 3, 2024, in Harlem’s historic Apollo Theater — the perfect symbolic venue for the first Black woman on the SCOTUS bench. Brown Jackson was interviewed by CBS News journalist Gayle King, who kept it light and personal while gracefully hitting all the significant life junctures documented in the book, without getting into political opinions.
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Issue 196 — April 11, 2022
Ketanji Brown Jackson.
Her name is already embedded in the annals of history as the first Black woman confirmed to sit on the Supreme Court of the United States.
After 232 years and 115 previous sitting justices, Judge Brown Jackson will become Justice Brown Jackson when she is sworn in at the end of the Court’s current term.
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Issue 195— March 28, 2022
The first time I gave a speech where I said “Be bold and carry out!” was to an audience of probably 1000 or so at the annual conference of WICT, Women In Cable Telecommunications. Smart, ambitious, accomplished women. And yet they still held no more than 20% of the top leadership positions in their industry.
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She will be Black, female and serving on the highest court in the land; the first time in its 232-year history. Coincidentally, the nomination will be official at the end of February, Black History Month and fulfills a 2019 campaign promise by President Joe Biden.
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Thousands gathered for a vigil near the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court following the news of the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, 87, from complications from pancreatic cancer.
Men, women and children carried signs and lit candles in honor of the woman who spent a lifetime fighting for “the end of days when women appear in high places only as one-at-a- time performers.”
Linda Hirshman, author of Sisters in Law: How Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sandra Day O’Connor Went To The Supreme Court and Changed The World, writes in Washington Post, “In her last years, people made songs and movies about her, and the public bought out her bobblehead dolls. None of that mattered to the real RBG. She cared about the Supreme Court, making it again the engine of an expanding legacy of American equality.”
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When Sandra Day O’Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg emerged from their private worlds of practice and teaching onto the public stage in the early 1970’s, the women’s movement was actively moving to become the next legal social movement. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 which passed in the wake of the racial social movement also barred discrimination on the basis of sex, and women’s movement lawyers were starting to bring cases under it. Then, in the heady days of the 1970’s, anything seemed possible.
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