Judge Michelle Childs, whose early life was shaped by gun violence, is on SCOTUS list
J. Michelle Childs, whose name in on President Biden's Supreme Court short list, has successfully navigated the conservative racial and political life of South Carolina to emerge at the top of the legal profession in the state.
Born in Detroit in 1966, she was 13 when her mother, a Michigan Bell telephone manager, moved the family to South Carolina. By then her mother and father had been divorced for some time. But within months of the move, the judge recalled in a 2018 speech, "I received a phone call that my father, a police officer, had died in Detroit from gunshot wounds. Of course, I was devastated."
Beyond that, little is publicly known about her father's death in 1980, except that the Associated Press reported at the time that that he "died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the chest." Although Rep. James Clyburn, who has been aggressively lobbying for Childs' nomination, has said her father died "in the line of duty," Ralph Childs is not on the Michigan state list of "fallen officers" in 1980.
