Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson discusses new memoir, ‘Lovely One,’ at Apollo Theater

NEW YORK (AP) — In one of her first public appearances on behalf of her newly published memoir, “Lovely One,” Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson didn’t make a lot of news, but she did make a little history: She can add her name to James Brown, Stevie Wonder and Smokey Robinson among others as someone who has sung at the Apollo Theater.

Reminiscing Tuesday night with interviewer Gayle King about her love for musical theater, Jackson ably crooned a few lines from “The Wiz” — “When I think of home, I think of a place/Where there’s love overflowing” — and threw in a favorite chant from “Schoolhouse Rock” — “I’m just a bill, yes I’m only a bill. And I’m sitting here on Capitol Hill.”

The capacity audience at the famed Harlem performance center cheered and sang along.

King had promised — and kept her promise — to focus on Jackson’s personal story and not on the law. Jackson discussed her childhood in Miami, the origins of her name (It means “lovely one,” the book’s title), her undergraduate years at Harvard University, her interracial marriage to Dr. Patrick Jackson — who was in the audience Tuesday night — and her rise through the court system, culminating in 2022 when she became the first Black woman on the Supreme Court. “A roaring ocean” in her ears is how she remembered the call from President Joe Biden, asking her if she would agree to fill the vacancy left by retiring Justice Stephen Breyer, for whom she had once clerked.

Jackson explained Tuesday that she had been interested since she was a girl, when she and her father, Johnny Brown, would sit together at the dining room table, she with coloring books and he with law books he was studying at the time. Her ambition grew in middle school after she learned about