Johnny Brown, the father of Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, died on Wednesday, according to an obituary published in the Miami Herald on Friday afternoon. He was 80 years old.
Jackson appeared on Tuesday night in a conversation at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Alaska Public Media reported that the end of her visit “came abruptly and without a clear reason,” while an Alaskan television station indicated that Jackson’s appearance was “cut short” “after a liaison informed her of a personal emergency.”
In her 2024 memoir, Lovely One, Jackson described her father’s life in detail. Brown had a “rock[y]” start in life as one of five children of a divorced mother who worked as a house cleaner and nurse’s aide, Jackson recounted. But after graduating from a segregated high school in Miami, Brown put himself through Kentucky State and North Carolina Central University, two historically Black universities.
Brown married Ellery Ross, a former high school classmate and the sister of two friends, in 1968. The couple spent several years as public school teachers in Washington, D.C., before returning to Florida so that Brown could attend law school at the University of Miami. He would eventually become the lead lawyer for the Miami-Dade County Public Schools.
In her memoir, Jackson credits Brown with her interest in the law, writing that he “would sometimes look up from his textbooks to talk to me about his cases, to ask me what I thought, as if I weren’t four years old. The conundrums he described fascinated me; they were stories of people in trouble, conflict, or sorrow, seeking the even-handed recourse of the law. I would first encounter my calling in that tiny kitchen in a small family apartment on the far edge of the University of Miami’s campus.”
