Johnny Brown, a longtime attorney and father of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, died July 15, the day after his daughter spoke at a Fairbanks event. He was 80 years old.
That’s according to an obituary published Friday in the Miami Herald.
Jackson’s July 14 talk with retired KUAC journalist Robert Hannon took place at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, inside a packed concert hall. The UAF Summer Sessions program organized the conversation.
At the event, Jackson, the first Black woman to sit on the nation’s top court, spoke at length about her journey to the court and her family, including the influence of her parents, who grew up in the segregated south. Jackson was born in Washington, D.C. in 1970, just a few years after the end of Jim Crow-era laws.
“So I'm born, and my parents are public school teachers, and they just took it upon themselves to train me to believe that I could do anything,” she said. “And they believed that I could do anything after their history and their experience.”
Jackson credited her father for her early interest in law.
She said, when she was three years old, their family moved from D.C. to Florida so that Brown – who later served as the top attorney for Miami-Dade County Public Schools, according to the obituary – could go to law school at the University of Miami.
Jackson said that period makes up some of her first memories, and that she "didn't know you were supposed to do anything else than go to law school because that's what I knew from that young.
“So I've always thought that I was going to be a lawyer, but the African-American experience, the struggles and the triumphs of the Civil Rights Movement were very much a part of who my parents were, and then it became a part of who I am through their teaching and instruction and all that they invested in me when I was very young,” she said.
The roughly 55-minute public discussion in Fairbanks focused largely on Jackson’s life and 2024 memoir before turning to certain court issues, like writing dissents and using the emergency docket.
The talk ended suddenly when the UAF Summer Sessions director approached the stage, saying court staff had informed her Jackson needed to attend to something. A Supreme Court spokesperson did not respond to an emailed question about whether Jackson’s quick departure was related to her father’s death.