By Vincent L Hall
If there’s a hell below, Clarence Thomas should be first to go! Yeah, I said it! And worse than that, I mean it!
As if the installation of the first Black Supreme Court Justice went a step too far in helping African Americans, the Republican Party ordered us two steps back with a sullen Negro named Clarence Thomas.
The racial pride and progress we saw in Justice Thurgood Marshall dissipated with the swearing-in of a shameless token.
The news wires have been ablaze over the last few weeks as Uncle Thomas’ lack of ethics has been exposed. To make it worse, Dallas has come into the limelight again.
This “affair” between billionaire Harlan Crow and his “friend” is a natural parallel to Jim Schutze’s book, “The Accommodation!”
Dallas is still stagnant because the “power structure” still handpicks Negroes who will ensure that no other Negro causes a problem.
Schutze went as far back as the 1930’s, but I can point to the same phenomenon alive and well in this city today. Dallas is still accommodating!
Please don’t tempt me. I can point to all of the “spooks by the door” who grace or disgrace us, active and retired. Don’t try me. I promised my mama I would play nice.
It should not confound you that Harlan Crow bought property from Thomas, refurbished it, and now has Thomas’ 94-year-old mother there. In addition, ProPublica revealed that Harlan purchased two nearby lots and Williams’ home in 2014 in Savannah, GA.
Crow reportedly paid $133,363 for the properties, which was much higher than Thomas’s valuation. In addition, the friendly billionaire improved the home, including a carport, a roof repair, a new fence, and gates.
While Black men of his era did everything to get their mamas out of the “master’s servant’s quarters. Thomas did just the opposite.
If you have been around as long as I have or studied history, you know that Injustice Thomas has made a name for himself in the “Conservative” movement at the expense of his own family. He has openly debased his kinship and profited from doing so.
A Chicago Tribune story, “THOMAS` SISTER’S LIFE GIVES LIE TO HIS WELFARE FABLE,” gives you some background. This column appeared in July 1994.
“In an often-quoted speech that he delivered to a conference of Black conservatives in 1980, Thomas said of his sister, who was then on welfare:
“She gets mad when the mailman is late with her welfare check. That’s how dependent she is.
“What’s worse is that now her kids feel entitled to the check too. They have no motivation for doing better or getting out of that situation.”
It was a stunning story. To hear Thomas tell it, his sister sounded like a classic ‘welfare queen’ of the sort presidential candidate Ronald Reagan singled out that same year, a painful example of how a well-intended government handout can tie families to a cycle of poverty and dependency.”
The article tells a fuller story of his sister and concludes that Thomas used his sister as a cudgel to cleave a place for himself in the Conservative movement.
“Unfortunately, Thomas` stunning story wasn’t true. Not quite.
When reporters recently tracked down Thomas` sister, Emma Mae Martin, living in a beat-up frame house with a hole in the roof in Pin Point, Ga., a few steps from where she and her two younger brothers were born, they didn’t find a story of welfare dependency.
Instead, they found a story of hard work by three generations of a family struggling, like most other families, just to make ends meet.
Martin was deserted by her husband in 1973, just as her father had disappeared 25 years earlier. She worked two minimum-wage jobs while her brother attended law school but stopped working to take care of an elderly aunt who had suffered a stroke. That led to four or five years on welfare, trying to make it on $169 a month.
That’s over.
She now works as a cook at the same hospital where her mother is a nurse’s assistant and she sometimes has to report to work at 3 a.m.
As Jesse Jackson would say, “She takes the early bus.”
I wonder if Thomas’ sister still takes the bus. But if there is a bus to hell, and I get to choose, he will be its first boarder. #uncletom
