Thurgood Marshall, the first Black Justice

On this day in history, Thurgood Marshall became the first Black Supreme Court Justice, shattering racial barriers. He was the brilliant mind behind the strategy that eradicated state-sponsored segregation in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case.

He founded The Legal Defense Fund to aid the Civil Rights Movement, using his legal genius to alter the course of American history. He championed and personified the LDF’s core values, vigorously combating discrimination, opposing the death penalty, and advocating for affirmative action.

Switching Marshall for Thomas

Marshall died in 1992 while still serving on the Court. President George H. W. Bush proudly nominated Thomas to replace him. But his infamous confirmation hearing revealed in many ways that Clarence Thomas was no Thurgood Marshall.

Indeed, never before in the history of the Supreme Court has one justice replacing another so reversed the advancement of Black folks. The cruel irony is that Thomas, a Black man, has seemed as committed to subjecting Blacks to Jim Crow laws again as the Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.

Frankly, you’d be forgiven for suspecting that Bush himself was a closeted White supremacist. Because only that would explain his nominating Thomas, a racist in Black face, to undo all the good Marshall had done to advance justice for Black folks.

Thomas, a closeted kept man

Thomas has already served for over 32 years. For most of that time, incredulous Blacks thought he was using his position on the court to exact revenge on us for the historic humiliation Anita Hill caused him at his confirmation hearing.

But thanks to ProPublica’s Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting over the past year, we now know that he was as motivated to please white paymasters as he was to avenge his own humiliation.

Indeed, as I write this, news is breaking that, despite refiling a financial disclosure to account for all gifts, Thomas failed to disclose many others his billionaire friends lavished upon him.

And all this from a justice who peddled this brazen tale of hypocrisy on 60 Minutes, the most popular news program in America:

‘I prefer the RV parks. I prefer the Walmart parking lots to the beaches and things like that. There’s something normal to me about it,’ Thomas said. ‘I come from regular stock, and I prefer that — I prefer being around that.

Meanwhile, only God knows what favors he has done to earn the millions in gifts his White patrons have doled out to him over the past 32 years.

The specter of Black-on-Black hate

There’s no denying the role this psychodrama has played in many of the anti-Black decisions Thomas has written or shepherded. We pity that he has spent his entire career pursuing self-hating and self-abnegating revenge against Black Americans.

It turns out Bush replaced Marshall, a proud man, with Thomas, a self-hating kept man. It is self-evident what Thomas has done to make a mockery of Marshall’s legacy.

Not to mention the unprecedented way his grifting has brought the Court into disrepute. It’s now debatable whether he’s a greater embarrassment to his country than he is to his race.

Mind you, this grifting might be Thomas practicing affirmative action for me, not for thee. He might argue that, unlike his White colleagues, he’s entitled to use his position to enrich himself because he grew up poor and Black and was the victim of “a high-tech lynching.”

It’s brazenly hypocritical. But, in case you haven’t noticed, Trump has convinced Republicans like Thomas that hypocritical grifting in public life is a virtue, not a vice.

President Biden nominated Ketanji Brown Jackson as the first Black woman to the Court in 2022. She will undoubtedly humiliate him in private deliberations on cases, just as Hill humiliated him in open hearings on his confirmation.

However, the control Thomas and his White cohorts wield is such that Jackson can do nothing to influence their Jim Crow 2.0 agenda.