Jackson says we must own hardest chapters of US history during 1963 church bombing remembrance

BIRMINGHAM, ALA. (AP) — Standing at the pulpit of the Birmingham, Alabama, church where four little girls were killed by a Ku Klux Klan bomb in 1963, Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said the nation must remember and own the uncomfortable moments of its past in order to move forward.

- Kimberly Chandler

Jackson, the first Black woman to serve on the nation's highest court, spoke at the 60th anniversary of the Sept. 15, 1963, bombing at 16th Street Baptist Church.

"Today, we remember the toll that was paid to secure the blessings of liberty for African Americans, and we grieve those four children who were senselessly taken from this earth and their families robbed of their potential," Jackson said.

She said the country should celebrate the great strides that have been made since 1963 but that there is still work to do. "The work of our time is maintaining that hard-won freedom, and to that we are going to need the truth, the whole truth about our past," Jackson said.

Jackson said she knows that atrocities "like the one we are memorializing today are difficult to remember and relive" but said it is also "dangerous to forget them."