…otection landmarks (Sweatt v. Painter; McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents; Brown v. Board of Education). Thurgood Marshall was one of the Supreme Court advocates who Robert Jackson admired, greatly. Marshall’s colleague Robert Carter told me that Justice Jackson was consistently an NAACP friend on the bench—by which Carter meant someone with a clean heart and an open mind. Robert Jackson would detest any race-based thought that Ketanji Jackson doe…

…eard, over three days, the first round of oral arguments in the five cases—Brown v. Board of Education and its companion cases—that challenged the constitutionality of States and the District of Columbia racially segregating public school children. During those months, Justice Jackson kept his law clerks Cronson and Rehnquist busy. They wrote memoranda on petitions seeking Court review, performed research, and read and commented on Jackson draft o…