CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — When a Confederate flag was hung from the window of a dormitory at Harvard University more than 30 years ago, members of the Black Students Association saw it as an attempt to tell them they did not belong there.

They sprang into action, “being vocal, agitating, militating, marching, doing all that great stuff,” Antoinette Coakley, one of the students, recalled recently. But the voice of another member — Ketanji Brown, a classmate who was soon to become one of Ms. Coakley’s best friends — cut through the noise.

“Ketanji said: ‘Wait a minute, as we’re doing this, we’re missing out on classes. As we’re fighting against this injustice, we’re actually doing them a service because we’re going to be failing,’” Ms. Coakley, now a law professor at Northeastern University, recalled.

“So we protested, but we made sure we were in class,” she added. “We were going to show them that by showing up the way that we did — excellently — that they were wrong.”

The Confederate flag incident was one of several at Harvard in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when a tense debate about whether it was a justifiable form of free speech roiled the campus. The university administration ultimately decided it could not force students to take down the flag, citing free speech, but encouraged students “to take more account of the feelings and sensitivities of others.”

Ms. Coakley and other longtime friends from Harvard said the reaction of their classmate, now Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, was emblematic of how she navigated one of the most elite and white institutions in the country — after being discouraged from even applying. In the end, her experience at Harvard illustrates how Judge Jackson, 51, has long recognized how America’s conflicting views of race and justice shape the world around her. She has embraced her identity while refusing to let affronts to it distract her.

Now, that path has taken her where no Black woman has ever gone in American history, to an expected appointment to the Supreme Court. In almost every other way, Judge Jackson is of the mold of justices who came before her — a widely admired, Harvard-educated overachiever with a respected record as a federal judge.

But it is her race and gender — and how they might influence her judicial views — that have dominated discussion of her nomination, in part because of President Biden’s campaign promise to appoint a Black woman to the court.

In this sense, at least, it may be familiar territory.

“She’s fearless in a world where it’s sometimes scary to be fearless,” said Lisa Fairfax, who was one of Judge Jackson’s college roommates and is now a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania.