Black Twitter isn’t taking too kindly to a Washington Post article published on Juneteenth that unpacks the genealogies of Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson and her husband.
The lengthy article goes into great detail about the couple’s respective heritages. Jackson’s ancestors were enslaved people while her husband’s forefathers were enslavers.
The Supreme Court justice reportedly had a number of ancestors who lived on plantations of wealthy owners. Her paternal great-great-great-grandfather, Olmstead Rutherford, lived with his wife and seven children on a 700-acre plantation owned by a former enslaver named John H. Rutherford. It’s also believed that Jackson’s maternal great-great-great-grandfather was enslaved by a wealthy plantation owner in southwest Georgia.
The justice’s husband, Patrick Jackson, comes from a long line of Ivy League graduates and rich, well-to-do businessmen and merchants alongside a number of distant cousins that include more than a dozen presidents and a half-dozen governors of Massachusetts. His great-great-great-great grandfather was the richest man in New England at the time of his death and made his fortune in part in the slave trade. Jackson even hails from a line of British royalty.
However, to many online who saw the story none of that matters. If anything, they find it odd that the Post would go to such extents to recount the lineages of the couple, let alone release their findings on Juneteenth.
“This article is disgusting and unnecessary,” one commenter wrote on Twitter.
Someone else said this certainly was “not worthy of a @washingtonpost article.”
Ketanji Brown Jackson became the first Black woman to serve on the Supreme Court of the United States in 2022. She and her husband met during their college days at Harvard.
“We were an unlikely pair in many respects,” Jackson pointed out in a 2017 speech, “but somehow we found each other.”
“I don’t think it came up at all, nor was it a point of interest or concern,” Calvin Ross, Jackson’s uncle, said of Patrick’s family history in the Post article. “We had two people who loved each other, and that was enough. You can’t rewrite history. It is what it is.”
