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Pin Point, Georgia, is a tiny place, just about a mile from end to end. It’s easy to miss from the highway, hidden by all the marshes and oak trees. But there is a sign by the side of the road advertising its claim to fame: “Welcome to Pin Point: Birth Place of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas 1991.”
In Pin Point, Thomas’ family ties still run deep. But when I visited there a couple of months ago, nobody was all that excited to talk about him. Some folks didn’t answer their doors. A few did speak with me in their front yards, so long as I agreed not to ask about Clarence.
I got where they were coming from. To call Clarence Thomas polarizing is an understatement. In 30-plus years on the Supreme Court, he’s pulled the country to the right on everything from voting and gun rights to abortion. And then there’s the matter of affirmative action, which he benefited from but now seems hellbent on striking down. There’s also the fact that his wife Ginni tried to overturn the 2020 election.
So, yeah, I could understand why folks didn’t want to talk. But after a while, somebody finally tipped me off to an address a few miles north of Pin Point, in the bigger city of Savannah. When I got there, I found a white, one-story house with a screened-in porch. On the front door was a sticker: “COVID-19 vaccine—I GOT IT.”
This was the place I’d been looking for: the home of Leola Williams, Clarence Thomas’ mother. Miss Leola, as I took to calling her, actually seemed tickled that I showed up. She’s 94 years old and still incredibly sharp. When we spoke, she was sitting in a recliner in a corner of her den with the curtains closed. The room was painted turquoise. MSNBC was playing on the TV.
Miss Leola’s two-bedroom home is where her son’s journey to the Supreme Court got started. And while I didn’t realize it at the time, that house in Savannah was about to become national news. Two weeks after I showed up, ProPublica reported that the house is now owned by Harlan Crow. He’s the right-wing megadonor who’s taken Thomas on a bunch of lavish trips and paid for his grandnephew’s school tuition—gifts that Thomas didn’t disclose.
You’ll hear my conversation with Miss Leola, and a lot more, in our new podcast series Slow Burn: Becoming Justice Thomas. In four episodes, we’ll reveal how a Black man from rural Georgia became one of America’s most powerful people—and how he brought the rest of us along with him, whether we like it or not. To get those answers, I talked to Thomas’ closest family and friends, his political mentor, and women who knew him long before he made it to the Supreme Court.
I remember watching Thomas’ explosive confirmation hearings in 1991, when I was 13 years old. I didn’t understand much of what I was seeing, or get how it revealed fault lines around race and gender. But I did know enough to recognize that parts of Thomas’ biography felt familiar. Both of us grew up in the South and went to Catholic schools. Both of us felt drawn to the fiery rhetoric of Black nationalism. And both of us had white folks tell us that we were affirmative action cases.
But at some point, the two of us started to see the world very differently. And I’ve always wanted to figure out why. In Slow Burn: Becoming Justice Thomas, you’ll go on that journey with me. You’ll learn about why Thomas came to despise the race-based admission policies that personally benefited him, how he credited his political rise to the Black self-sufficiency preached by Malcolm X, and who the American people didn’t hear from during those 1991 confirmation hearings.
Listen to Slow Burn: Becoming Justice Thomas
On this season’s first episode, we explore how Clarence Thomas went from an aspiring priest to a campus radical.
