Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson on Friday delivered a stirring defense of the need to educate American school children about the nation’s dark history of racial inequality and violence in a still-ongoing battle for civil rights.
“The work of our time is maintaining that hard-won freedom, and to do that, we’re going to need the truth — the whole truth — about our past,” Jackson said in a speech at the Birmingham, Alabama, 16th Street Baptist Church, where a bomb planted by members of the Ku Klux Klan killed four young girls and injured dozens of others 60 years ago.
“We must teach it to our children and preserve it for theirs,” Jackson said. “Knowledge of the past is what enables us to mark our forward progress. If we’re going to continue to move forward as a nation, we can’t allow concern about discomfort to displace knowledge, truth, or history.”
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