Ketanji Brown Jackson is the first black woman to serve as a Supreme Court justicebut decades earlier, She was a Harvard student tries to find her way. That’s when she meets Patrick Jackson, a white fellow student who joined an initiative to remove the Confederate flag from campus. He became her husband.

In an interview with Gayle King for CBS Mornings to talk about her new book In “Lovely One,” the judge recounted in detail how she and Jackson met and navigated their intercultural relationship.

“I love the backstory of your meeting. I’m already watching the movie,” King said.

Brown Jackson said she and her now-husband took a course together called “Changing Race in America” ​​and were initially friends, but over time she began to develop a relationship with him.

Brown Jackson, however, was wary of meeting his family. He had grown up white and privileged, and his grandmother had offered to pay for his medical school. She feared that generous offer would be off the table after she found out he had a black girlfriend.

“I mean, I was just nervous about the whole situation. My parents had grown up in the South, where there was segregation, and this was an interracial relationship, which was unusual,” she said.

Jackson assured her that it would work.

“At one point he said, ‘I’m choosing you,’ because I was worried that his grandmother had promised to pay for his medical school, and I was afraid that might mean that if 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’m choosing you.'”

Brown Jackson called it “quite extraordinary.”

She also said her parents supported their relationship. But, as King pointed out, her father told her, “We trust Patrick, but this is America.”

Brown Jackson said that an interracial relationship was scary at first, but her parents realized that she and her husband were meant for each other and shared many of the same values.

The couple married in 1996 and had two daughters.

“Patrick believed in it and Patrick knew this was going to happen to you,” King said. “This is someone who believed in you from the beginning.”

Jackson wiped tears from his eyes in the studio for the CBS Mornings interview as he looked at his wife.

Brown Jackson told another story from Harvard that has stuck with her over the years. It was a brief, monosyllabic conversation with a stranger she passed on the trail.

“Well, I was feeling really depressed at the time, you know, so many freshmen suffer from imposter syndrome,” she said, adding that she wasn’t sure if she belonged at Harvard.

“And this woman passed me on the path and leaned over and said, ‘Hang on,’ and then she kept walking,” she said. “I just thought, wow. You know. That really stuck with me. And it started to change my perspective on what I was doing there.”

After graduating from Harvard-Radcliffe University with a bachelor’s degree in political science in 1992, she attended Harvard Law School and graduated in 1996. After working in private practice and three clerkships with the federal government, she served on the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia from 2013 to 2021, until President Biden nominated her to the Supreme Court.

During her hearing, a photo of her husband and daughter Leila went viral. The teenager looked proudly at her mother, who was about to become the first black woman to serve on the highest court in the land.

King said the injection brought her to tears.

“It was a moment of pride. You didn’t see it in the moment. But what did you think when you saw it? It seemed to say so many things to me,” King said.

“That’s true,” Brown Jackson said. “So many people came up to me and told me how touched they were by this picture.” She said it was “wonderful” to know how proud her daughter was.