President Biden and his legal team have spent a year preparing for this moment: the chance to make good on his pledge to name the first Black woman to the Supreme Court. From The New York Times
WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden and his legal team have spent a year preparing for this moment: the chance to make good on his pledge to name the first Black woman to the Supreme Court at a time of continuing racial reckoning for the country.
J. Michelle Childs, 55, a little-known U.S. District Court judge in South Carolina whom Biden recently nominated for an appeals court, is also seen as a potential contender. One of Biden’s top congressional allies, Rep. James E. Clyburn of South Carolina, told Biden during the presidential campaign that he believed she should be appointed, in part because she came from a blue-collar background, another underrepresented group among federal judges.
Biden has said he hopes the diversity he has brought to the high ranks of the federal government will be a centerpiece of his legacy. In addition to his record on judgeships, his decision to pick Kamala Harris as his running mate during the 2020 campaign led to her becoming the first Black woman to serve as vice president.
According to a 2021 profile of the legal profession by the American Bar Association, just 4.7% of American lawyers are Black and 37% of lawyers are female. The report did not break out Black women in particular, but the implication is that roughly 2% of American lawyers are both Black and female. The promise helped Biden secure the support of Clyburn just days before the party’s contest in South Carolina.
It also would come as the conservative-dominated court agreed this week to hear cases challenging race-conscious college admissions programs, raising the possibility that it may ban affirmative action policies aimed at maintaining racial diversity. For Democrats, maintaining enthusiastic support among Black voters, and especially Black women, may be critical in November’s midterm elections. Democratic activists urged Biden on Wednesday not to back down from his promise.
In April, when Biden announced his first three appeals court nominees, all three were Black women with Ivy League educations, including Jackson. Two more of the next 10 appellate judges he appointed are also Black women. And of his six appellate nominees still pending before the Senate, three are Black women.
New York City did not have its first Black female judge until 1939, when Jane Matilda Bolin was appointed to the Domestic Relations Court, Blackburne-Rigsby wrote, adding that when the city’s mayor, Fiorello H. LaGuardia, appointed Bolin, he first consulted her husband — a sign of the times and of the limits placed on Black women in the court system.
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