Retired Md. judge reflects on Ketanji Brown Jackson’s significance for Black progress

On July 5, 1852, the day after Independence Day, abolitionist and orator Frederick Douglass delivered a speech in Rochester, New York, called “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” Nearly 170 years after his blistering indictment of slavery in America, following the swearing-in of Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson onto an embattled Supreme Court, the question remains top of mind for one Prince George’s County resident: retired Maryland Circuit Court Judge Ingrid Turner.