Justice Thomas’s Life A Tangle of Poverty, Privilege and Race
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By Kevin Merida and Michael A. Fletcher
Washington Post Staff WritersOne of the local dealers was Clarence Thomas’s nephew. Until his 30-year prison sentence began in 1999, Mark Elliot Martin, the son of Thomas’s sister, had been part of Pin Point’s drug problem. He had been in and out of trouble, and in and out of jail — at least 12 arrests, according to court records. In 1997, the year Martin was convicted of pointing a pistol at another person, Thomas assumed custody of his nephew’s son, with the nephew’s permission. Mark Elliot Martin Jr. — “Marky,” they called him — was a precocious, curly-haired 6-year-old. The justice promised to give Mark what Thomas’s grandfather had given him at the same age — opportunities to succeed beyond what the boy had in Pin Point.
Thomas’s intervention in this family crisis reflects a side of him not widely known. As arguably the most powerful African American in public life, he labors under expectations that none of his fellow justices face. Even as Thomas goes about his work, perhaps the purest conservative on the high court, it is his racial identity that shadows him. For 16 years, there have been questions: Would he be on the court if he were not black? Would his silence at oral arguments cast doubt on his intellect if he were not black? Would he be the subject of such public scrutiny if he were not a black conservative?
Ever since Thomas replaced Thurgood Marshall in 1991, many have struggled to reconcile who he is today with where he began — as the Jim Crow-era child of deprivation in Pin Point, a boy whose family insulated its shack with newspapers and shared an outhouse with neighbors.
Ketanji Brown Jackson, a former clerk for Justice Stephen G. Breyer, remembers sitting across from Thomas at lunch once with a quizzical expression on her face. Jackson, who is black, said Thomas “spoke the language,” meaning he reminded her of the black men she knew. “But I just sat there the whole time thinking: ‘I don’t understand you. You sound like my parents. You sound like the people I grew up with.’ But the lessons he tended to draw from the experiences of the segregated South seemed to be different than those of everybody I know.”
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