Ketanji Brown Jackson and the Old, Bad Racism

The confirmation this week of Ketanji Brown Jackson for the Supreme Court post to be vacated by Justice Stephen Breyer is a great victory for Black rights, human rights, and the cause of justice itself. But I suspect that a lot of Americans middle-aged or younger don’t understand just how insuperable the barriers to such an event once seemed.

The subject has been much on my mind over the last few months because I’ve been working on a play about the 1960 desegregation of lunch counters in downtown Tampa. The play is called “When the Righteous Triumph” and was commissioned by Stageworks a year ago or so, with a staged reading later this month and a scheduled full production in March, 2023. In order to write it, I had to interview persons who were there in 1960, read newspaper accounts from the time, and immerse myself in the worldview of “ordinary” Tampa citizens, some of them racist to the core. What I discovered was that in 1960, African Americans were not allowed on public beaches, or into local movie theaters, bowling alleys, or Lowry Park Zoo. A Black man who dared to drive through Plant City was taking his life in his hands; and – to get to the subject of my play – a Black shopper was not permitted to sit down at a downtown Woolworth’s, Kress, or Maas Brothers and drink a soda or enjoy a slice of pie. When a brave barber named Clarence Fort decided to emulate demonstrators in Greensboro, North Carolina and demand service at Woolworth’s on Franklin Street, he was refused it and the “sit-ins” began. With the help of many Black Tampans and the leadership of Reverend A. Leon Lowry, the impossible took place: by the end of the year, Blacks and whites sat together at lunch counters all over Tampa. But the other disabilities remained.

I was six years old in 1960, and in the years that followed I was witness to a lot of knee-jerk racism. In 1971, when I was one of the valedictorians at the Plant High School graduation ceremony, I said in my speech that integration of area schools was a good thing that we could be proud of – and afterward an adult came up to me and said, “Why do you want to start the Civil War all over again?” As if it had ever ended for the thousasnds of African Americans in the Bay area, as if Reconstruction hadn’t fallen apart a mere decade after it began, as if there weren’t two water fountains at the Kwik Chek on Grand Central Boulevard, one saying “White” and one saying “Colored.” Perhaps the most shocking thing I read as I was researching my play was a 1960 Tampa Tribune editorial claiming “Florida’s race relations have been good.” Good? When a Black child wasn’t allowed even to appreciate the animals at the local zoo? The blindness of this lie, the nerve!

So it’s with great relief that I heard Ketanji Brown Jackson give her confirmation speech today. Racism isn’t anywhere near dead, but the impossible has come true again, and an important step has been taken. There’s a debate among historians whether progress is a real thing or an illusion we project onto random events. Thanks to President Biden and the thousands of Black and white activists who have been standing up for equality since my childhood days in Tampa, I can believe again in progress. It’s happened slowly, too slowly, but it’s there again in the person of our new Supreme Court Justice. Let’s wish her well. A lot of people have been waiting a long time for her arrival.