Michelle Childs, a potential Supreme Court pick, recalls being 'devastated' at father's gunshot deat
Childs’s experiences growing up with a single mother and breaking barriers in the South helped shape her positions
By Michael Kranish
Yesterday at 6:00 a.m. EST|Updated yesterday at 5:36 p.m. EST
J. Michelle Childs had recently moved with her mother to Columbia, S.C., in 1980 when the 14-year-old got the news about her father, who had stayed behind in violence-scarred Detroit as they fled in search of a safer life.
“I received a phone call that my father, a police officer, had died in Detroit,” Childs recalled in the draft of a 2018 speech. A handwritten notation on the draft, reviewed by The Washington Post, added the cause of death: “from gunshot wounds.”
. . .
A review of thousands of pages of documents she has submitted to a Senate committee and interviews with close associates and other observers makes it clear that she’s been unusually outspoken during her judicial career on social issues that directly relate to her childhood traumas and her experiences pushing boundaries as a Black woman in the South.
Raised after her father’s death by a single mother, Childs was the first in her family to attend college and was a beauty pageant winner who once considered modeling. She has spent much of her life overcoming discrimination and breaking barriers as the first Black woman to become a partner at a major South Carolina law firm, and then as a state and federal judge, where she made rulings that went against the state’s prevailing politics. She has stepped beyond her federal judgeship to speak out on social issues such as racial discrimination, the disproportionate incarceration of Blacks, and gun violence.
More:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/02/12/michelle-childs-father-death-supreme-court-biden/
