Why Harlan Crow Purchased Clarence Thomas’s Mother’s HomeThe transaction was conducted ethically — but the Left’s attacks on Justice Thomas have nothing to do with ethics. By Mark Paoletta
The attacks on Justice Thomas never stop. Shortly after falsely accusing him of breaking the law by failing to disclose trips he took with his close friend Harlan Crow, the Democrats and their media allies are now smearing the justice by claiming that Crow’s purchase of Justice Thomas’s mother’s home was some scheme to enrich the justice.
This couldn’t be farther from the truth. Justice Thomas and Harlan Crow both acted honorably and ethically in this transaction, and it’s important to understand what led Crow to want to purchase this home. (Full disclosure: I worked on Justice Thomas’s confirmation as a lawyer in the White House in 1991, and I remain close friends with him. I have also co-edited the book Created Equal: Clarence Thomas in His Own Words and have gone on trips with him and Harlan Crow, with whom I’m also friends. I have also represented Ginni Thomas in the House Select January 6 Committee inquiry.)
Crow, the son of a nationally renowned real-estate developer, was born into a wealthy family. Thomas was born into abject poverty, to uneducated parents, and had a father who abandoned the family when he was two years old. He grew up under segregation in the Deep South. Despite their different backgrounds, Crow’s and Thomas’s shared interests and values led them to cross paths. The two developed a close friendship after first meeting in 1996.
As has been well reported, Crow is a serious collector of American historical artifacts. He strives to preserve, learn from, and celebrate the history of our nation’s journey. As a friend of Justice Thomas, Harlan also recognized that the justice’s life story is one of the great American stories that highlights the best of America.
In 2001, Crow and Thomas visited the justice’s hometown of Savannah, Ga. During the visit, Crow visited the Carnegie Library, which was segregated when Thomas was growing up. It was here that Thomas fell in love with reading and widened his worldview to look beyond the racist laws and practices that were then in place. The library was in disrepair, and Crow wanted to help. He decided to provide funding in 2001 to restore this building where his friend, who was now the second black Supreme Court justice in our history, had first learned to dream. To honor this incredible success story, the gift came with a request to name a wing of the library after Justice Thomas.
On another visit to the area, Crow saw the run-down seafood cannery on the edge of the water in Pin Point, Ga. Pin Point was founded by freed blacks after the Civil War and had its own distinctive culture and dialect, Gullah-Geechee. In fact, Justice Thomas’s first language was Geechee, and he writes beautifully in his memoir about growing up in this community. Justice Thomas was born in a shanty fewer than 50 yards away with no running water and only one light bulb. The oyster and crab cannery buildings, owned by the Varn family, where Thomas’s mother and sister worked, were the center of the community. To preserve this important piece of American history, Crow bought the factory in 2008 and helped create a museum dedicated to celebrating the Gullah-Geechee culture. Because Varn and his wife still lived on the property, Crow included as part of the contract a lifetime-occupancy provision, meaning that the Varns could continue to live there for the rest of their lives without having to pay rent, while Crow took control of the property to preserve it and make it available to the community.
Crow also wanted to help renovate the convent of the nuns that Thomas had attended beginning in 1955: Saint Benedict the Moor Catholic School, the then-segregated, all-black elementary school. His grandfather had enrolled Clarence and his brother Myers in this school, which was run by the Franciscan Sisters of the Immaculate Conception, who were mostly from Ireland. They transformed Thomas’s life. Justice Thomas has always honored them, and he delivered a beautiful tribute to them in 1984:
There was no way I could have survived if it had not been for the nuns — our nuns, who made me pray when I didn’t want to and didn’t know why I should — who made me work when I saw no reason to — who made me believe in the equality of races when our country paid lip service to equality and our church tolerated inequality — who made me accept responsibilities for my own life when I looked for excuses. No, my friends, without our nuns, I would not have made it to square one.
The former convent was owned by the Savannah College of Art and Design and was part of its college campus. Crow agreed to upgrade the building and honor Justice Thomas by naming it the “Clarence Thomas Center for Historic Preservation.”
These were all nice gestures by Crow, consistent with his passion to preserve American history. In the process, he honored a local son who has gone on to be one of the most influential justices in American history. None of these projects provided any financial benefit to Justice Thomas.
In 2014, Crow visited Thomas’s boyhood home, where the justice’s mother, Leola Williams, was living. The neighborhood was unsafe, with crack houses nearby, and drug dealers and derelicts roaming the street. Crow asked Thomas what would happen to this home when his mother passed, and Justice Thomas replied that he would bulldoze it. Crow thought this was a horrible idea — this was the home where Thomas came to live with his grandparents in 1955, when he was seven. His life was forever changed by his being raised by his grandparents, and Crow did not want this home lost to history.
When Crow first expressed interest in buying the home, he did not know that Justice Thomas had an ownership interest in it — he thought it was just his mother’s home. Crow’s team did their due diligence and came up with a market price of $133,000 for the home and two vacant lots on the same street. The vacant lots were previously owned by Thomas’s grandfather and later inherited by Thomas, his mother, and the estate of his deceased brother. (This sale did not include the farmhouse in Liberty County, Ga., in which Justice Thomas still has a one-third interest.)
As part of the contract, Crow granted a lifetime-occupancy agreement to Thomas’ mother, then 85, just as he had done with the Varns several years earlier. This was no gift, as the lifetime-occupancy agreement was part of the market-price calculation. This arrangement allowed Crow to begin the work to preserve the property immediately while allowing Mrs. Williams, now 94, to continue to live there. Crow also bought several other homes and lots on this street, and this small area has since been transformed into a beautiful, vibrant, and safe street.
In the years preceding this transaction, Justice Thomas and his wife put significant sums of money into making improvements to his mother’s house. Given these costs, their one-third share of its sale price amounted to a capital loss on the property. Because of that, Justice Thomas did not believe that the sale of his mother’s home was a reportable transaction. He never considered this inherited home as an “investment or trust,” which is the language that appears on the financial-disclosure form where a filer must report any transaction over $1,000. Now that this has been brought to his attention, Justice Thomas is expected to amend his previous financial-disclosure form to reflect this sale. Amendments are not uncommon.
Over the years, several justices have amended their filings. For example, in 2021, Justice Sotomayor amended her 2016 financial-disclosure form to add six trips that had been paid for by a third party. She had forgotten about them, and when she realized the omission, she amended her forms. Nobody questioned her integrity. Justice Jackson hadn’t disclosed her husband’s medical-malpractice-consulting fees for years, nor the income she received from teaching. She noted this oversight on the disclosure form she filled out for her Supreme Court nomination. Again, nobody questioned her integrity. Why is Justice Thomas being held to a different standard?
The latest attacks on Justice Thomas have nothing to do with ethics. Instead, the attacks are about undermining the Supreme Court now that it no longer acts as a super-legislature for implementing the Left’s progressive policies. Other justices have also suffered baseless attacks on their ethics and character. The Left is weaponizing financial disclosures to smear conservative justices. It’s important for defenders of the Court to call this out for what it is. Meanwhile, Justice Thomas and his colleagues can hopefully continue to focus on their work: issuing legal opinions that are faithful to the Constitution.
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