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At Harvard, Ketanji Brown Jackson knew about a White student fighting to remove a Confederate flag. He is now her husband.
Ketanji Brown Jackson is the first Black woman to serve as a Supreme Court justice, but decades before, she was a Harvard student trying to find her way. That’s when she met Patrick Jackson, a White classmate who joined an effort to have a Confederate flag removed from campus. He went on to become her husband.
In an interview with Gayle King for CBS Mornings to talk about her new book “Lovely One,” the justice opened up about how she and Jackson met and navigated their interracial relationship.
“I love the backstory of your meeting. I already see the movie,” King said.
Brown Jackson said she and her now-husband were in a class together called “Changing the Concept of Race in America,” and started out as friends. But over time, she began to like him as something more.
However, Brown Jackson was worried about meeting his family. He grew up White and privileged and his grandmother had offered to pay for his medical schooling. She worried that after finding out he had a Black girlfriend, that generous offer would be taken off the table.
“I mean I was just nervous about the whole scenario. My parents had grown up in the South and segregation and, you know, this was an interracial relationship, which was unusual,” she said.
Jackson reassured her it would work out.
“At one point he said, ‘I choose you,’ because I was worried that, you know, his grandmother had promised to pay for his medical school, and I was worried that it might mean that when she found out about me, she wouldn’t do it,” Brown Jackson said. “And he said, ‘Even if I have to take a job or do something else, I choose you.'”
Brown Jackson called that “pretty extraordinary.”
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She also said her parents came around to support their relationship. But, as King pointed out, her father told her, “We trust Patrick, but this is America.”
While Brown Jackson said it was scary at first to be in an interracial relationship, her parents realized she and her husband were right for each other and shared a lot of the same values.
The pair went on to marry in 1996 and have two daughters.
“Patrick believed and Patrick knew that this was going to happen for you,” King said. “Talk about somebody who believed in you from the very beginning.”
Jackson, in the studio for the CBS Mornings interview, wiped away tears watching his wife.
Brown Jackson shared another story from Harvard that stuck with her all these years. It was a short, one-word interaction with a stranger who passed her while walking down a path.
“Well, I was feeling really depressed at the time, you know, so many freshmen go through the, you know, imposter syndrome,” she said, adding that she was not sure if she belonged at Harvard.
“And this woman passed me on the path and leaned over and she said, ‘Persevere.’ And then she kept going,” she said. “I was like, wow. You know. It just really stuck with me. And started to change my view of what I was doing there.”
After graduating from Harvard-Radcliffe in 1992 with a Bachelor’s Degree in government, she went on to Harvard Law School, graduating in 1996. After working in private practice and three federal clerkships she served on the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia from 2013 to 2021, until President Biden appointed her to the Supreme Court.
Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images
During her confirmation hearing, a photo of her husband and daughter Leila went viral. The teen stared proudly at her mom, who was about to become the first Black woman to serve on the nation’s highest court.
King said the shot made her tear up.
“It was such a moment of pride. You didn’t see it in that moment. But when you saw it, what did you think? It seemed to say so many things to me,” King said.
“It did,” Brown Jackson said. “So many people came up to me and talked about how that picture had moved them.” She said realizing how proud her daughter was was a “wonderful thing.”
Police arrested a man on murder charges this month, 14 years after he allegedly killed a man in Virginia, but the victim’s body has never been found.
Shane Ryan Donahue, a Virginia man, is presumed deceased, the Prince William County Police Department said Tuesday. He was last seen leaving his parents’ home in Nokesville, Virginia, on March 22, 2010. Donahue, 23, was headed to his house in Nokesville, but never made it there.
Donahue was added to the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System after he vanished. According to records, Donahue did not have a car and regularly got rides from friends. He frequented Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Fauquier County, Virginia, and Northern Virginia.
The case stumped investigators, who followed a number of leads over the years. This spring, detectives reactivated the investigation and started looking at every detail of the case from scratch, officials said. They revisited people who had been interviewed during the initial investigation and reviewed “digital evidence in greater detail due to advances in analytical technology and modern police investigative practices,” according to a news release.
Officers said Donahue was last seen leaving his parents’ home with Timothy Sean Hickerson, now a 43-year-old Florida resident. Investigators connected Hickerson to a burglary at Donahue’s home that happened just days before the Virginia man disappeared.
Detectives got an arrest warrant this month and, with the help of Florida’s Flagler County Sheriff’s Office, Hickerson was taken into custody in Palm Coast, Florida. Hickerson was charged with murder and burglary, is now set to be extradited to Virginia.
Former President Donald Trump, an avowed proponent of tax cuts, is floating the idea of reversing a measure passed during his tenure in the White House that effectively raised taxes for many U.S. homeowners.
In a post Tuesday on Truth Social, Trump suggested he would scrap a $10,000 cap on deducting state and local taxes (SALT) that was passed as part of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act — a massive revamp that he has said boosted economic growth.
Now, in the run-up to the November election, Trump said in the post he would “get SALT back, lower your taxes, and so much more,” although he stopped short of offering details. Trump made the post ahead of a speech he’s giving Wednesday at the Nassau Coliseum on Long Island.
Trump’s new proposal for getting rid of his $10,000 SALT deduction cap comes as the presidential hopeful is pitching several additional tax cuts that would, if enacted, reduce taxes for major groups of voters. He’s also vowed to eliminate taxes on Social Security benefits, a pledge that could get support from the nation’s senior citizens, as well as to end income taxes on tipped workers and on overtime pay, ideas that would help lower- and middle-income Americans.
Yet Trump’s reversal on the SALT deduction has sparked skepticism from lawmakers as well as economists and policy experts.
“So … now Trump is against the SALT tax cap which *checks notes* is a key part of the — only — major piece of legislation passed during his administration?” noted Chris Koski, a political science professor at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, on X.
Rep. Tom Suozzi, a Democrat from Nassau, Queens, said in a statement on Wednesday that he is “happy that the former president is saying that he has finally reversed his devastating decision in 2017 to cap the State and Local Tax (SALT) deduction.” He also urged Trump to convince Republican lawmakers to vote to restore the full deduction “if he is truly serious.”
The SALT deduction cap “has been a body blow to my constituents for the past 7 years,” Suozzi added.
Senator Chuck Schumer, a Democrat from New York, wrote on X,”Donald Trump took away your SALT dedications and hurt so many Long Island families. Now, he’s coming to Long Island to pretend he supports SALT. It won’t work.”
Asked for details about Trump’s proposal to restore the SALT writeoff, a spokeswoman for the Trump campaign told CBS MoneyWatch: “While his pro-growth, pro-energy policies will make life affordable again, President Trump is also going to quickly move tax relief for working people and seniors.”
Here’s what to know about the SALT deduction.
What is the SALT deduction?
The state and local tax deduction allows taxpayers who itemize to deduct property taxes, sales taxes and state or local income taxes from their federal income taxes. Prior to the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, there was no limit on how much people could deduct through the SALT deduction.
But the 2017 tax overhaul passed under Trump limited the deduction to $10,000 – a blow to many homeowners in states with high property taxes, many of which are Democratic leaning. At the time of the law’s passage, the Treasury Department estimated that almost 11 million taxpayers in high-tax states like New York and New Jersey would forfeit $323 billion in deductions.
Who benefits from the SALT deduction?
Homeowners with high property taxes, such as people in New York, New Jersey and California, were the biggest beneficiaries of the the full SALT deduction.
But some experts also noted that the SALT deduction primarily put more money in the pockets of higher-earning Americans. About 80% of the full SALT deduction had helped people earning more than $100,000 a year, according to the Tax Foundation.
What happened after Trump capped the SALT deduction at $10,000?
The limit has increasingly impacted middle-class homeowners across the U.S. because of rising property taxes and incomes. Some lawmakers have also sought to either repeal or increase the SALT cap, but none of those efforts have borne fruit.
Earlier this year, some lawmakers sought to double the SALT deduction cap to $20,000 for married couples, with the change retroactive for the 2023 tax year. But that bill was blocked in the House in February.
Won’t the SALT deduction cap expire anyway?
Yes, the SALT deduction cap is a provision that’s due to expire in 2025, as are many other parts of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, such as a reduction of the individual tax brackets. But Trump has previously indicated he wants to extend the provisions in his signature tax law.
How much would it cost the U.S. to repeal the SALT deduction cap?
It won’t be cheap, according to the the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a think tank that focuses on budget and policy issues.
Eliminating the $10,000 deduction limit “would increase the cost of extending the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) by $1.2 trillion over a decade,” the group estimates, adding that such a measure would be a “costly mistake.”
Extending the TCJA’s tax cuts would increase the nation’s deficit by $3.9 trillion over the next decade, the group estimates. By adding in a expiration or repeal of the SALT deduction cap, that would grow to $5.1 trillion, it added.
“Lawmakers should not extend the TCJA without a plan to – at a minimum – offset the costs of extension, but ideally the plan would raise revenues relative to current law and help put the nation’s debt on a better trajectory,” the group said in a statement.
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