Ted Cruz Asks Ketanji Brown Jackson If She Agrees With The 1619 Project's Thesis

Photo credit: Gage Skidmore/CC BY-SA 2.0, via Flickr

At today's Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing for Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) asked questions relating to the 1619 Project.

Sen. Ted Cruz: Particularly close but we were always friendly and cordial. 

Judge Jackson: We were. 

Sen. Cruz: You and I had a productive meeting in my office. Discussed a number of things where you were there with former senator Dug Jones and we discussed how he and I and a number of senators had for two different years participated in reading aloud on the senate floor Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s fox news alert a bridge jail, which someone of the truly great you and I talked together about our shared admiration for dr. King. When senator Grassley questioned you earlier, he asked in particular about Dr. Martin Luther King's speech on the steps of the lincoln memorial where he said most critically. I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. Do you agree with what Dr. King said in that speech there?

Judge Jackson: I do senator. 

Sen. Cruz: As we were discussing it, you referenced in my office a speech that you gave in January of 2020 at the University of Michigan school of law. And after our discussion, I pulled a copy of your speech and read the speech in its entirety. And there were elements of the speech that I thought was really powerful. 

And, let me say, your opening remarks yesterday were powerful and inspirational as well. And I think you and your family, the journey you have taken to becoming a federal judge, to becoming a federal court of appeals judge I think demonstrates the incredible promise and opportunity this nation offers all of us. As I read your speech at the University of Michigan law school, however, there was a portion that surprised me. And, in particular, in that speech, you referenced the work of, quote: a claimed investigative journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones and her -- again, this is a quote from the speech provocative thesis that:

America was born, that the provocative thesis that the America that was born in 1776 was not the perfect union that is purported to be. And, indeed, ms. Hannah Jones in her 1619 projects describes the central thesis of the 1619 project, which the "New York Times" laid out as a revisionist look of history revising American history and Ms. Hannah Jones described her central thesis as, quote: one of the primary researchers the colonists decided to declare independence was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery. Now, that claim is a highly contested historical claim. Do you agree with Ms. Hannah-Jones that one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare independence was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery?

Judge Jackson replied to Cruz she said: Thank you, senator. When I gave that speech at the University of Michigan, I was asked to speak on Martin Luther King day. And every year they have a martin Luther king day speaker. And I gave a speech about black women in the civil rights movement. Most of the speech, if not all of the speech, was focused on African-American women, their contributions to the civil rights movement, unsung contributions in many cases, and then some of the more recent African-American women who have made claims, who have done things in our society. One slide was off Ms. -- a journalist as you say who made that statement, and I called it provocative. It is not something that I have studied. It doesn't come up in my work. I was mentioning it because it was at least at that time something that was talked about and well-known to the students that I was speaking to at the law school. 

You can see the complete interaction between Ketanji Brown and Sen. Ted Cruz shown below: