When the late Thurgood Marshall was appointed the first African American on the U.S. Supreme Court in 1967, he was already a distinguished NAACP civil rights attorney who had successfully argued the case for school desegregation in 1954 in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. Marshall won 29 of 32 cases before the high court, including persuading the Justices to declare as unconstitutional the exclusion of African American voters in primary elections and outlaw “restrictive covenants” that discriminated against African Americans and “separate but equal” facilities for African American professionals and graduate students in state universities.

Harvard University had rejected Marshall because of his race and Southern senators stalled his nomination by President John F. Kennedy to the U.S. Court of Appeals. President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed him U.S. Solicitor General in 1965 and, two years later, nominated him to the Supreme Court. It was that background which allowed Marshall to take real diversity to the bench and a fresh perspective on the law. "You do what you think is right and let the law catch up," he once said. And: "Where you see wrong or inequality or injustice, speak out, because this is your country. This is your democracy. Make it. Protect it. Pass it on." As to a successor, he said race should not be used as an “excuse” for “doing wrong. … I mean, for picking the wrong Negro and saying, ‘I’m picking him because he’s a Negro.’ I’m opposed to that. There’s no difference between a white snake and a black snake. They both bite.”

President George H. W. Bush did nominate a “Negro” to the supposed “black seat” to succeed Marshall: Clarence Thomas, who served as assistant secretary in the U.S Department of Education, chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and a judge for one year on the U.S. Court of Appeal. One of his more enduring remarks during his Senate confirmation hearing was that he was being subjected to “hi-tech lynching” as he was grilled after Anita Hill, a subordinate at the EEOC, accused him of sexual misconduct. But Thomas has spent his more than 30 years on the court thwarting legislation intended to prevent the figurative lynching of people like him.

Thomas criticizes affirmation action but he was admitted to Yale Law School because of racial preference and has invoked Marshall’s name, along with his arguments as a lawyer in the school desegregation case, to assert that affirmative action violates the constitutional rights of non-African American college applicants. Most notably, he voted with a 5-4 majority in 2013 to gut the Voting Rights Act.

Corey Robin, author of “The Enigma of Clarence Thomas,” said he studied some 700 of Thomas’ more than 3,000 opinions and concluded that he is on a mission to "explain to African Americans that there is very little that the government can do for them,” federal assistance is "a more deceptive form of slavery" and “they have everything to lose through their allegiance to the Democratic Party."

This insistence that redemption lies with the Republican Party seems to be not so much part of the political DNA of those extolling it as much as seeking to justify allegiance to a party which has a 50-year history of voter suppression and coddles a racist criminal justice system, mass incarceration and police brutality to break up families and is now trying to erase slavery from the nation’s history.

And so it was that Tim Scott, sole Republican African American U.S. senator, while delivering the rebuttal to President Joe Biden’s first State of the Union address in 2021, proclaimed, "Hear me clearly. America is not a racist country. … When America comes together, we’ve made tremendous progress. But powerful forces want to pull us apart. A hundred years ago, kids in classrooms were taught the color of their skin was their most important characteristic – and if they looked a certain way, they were inferior. Today, kids again are being taught that the color of their skin defines them – and if they look a certain way, they’re an oppressor.”

And Dr. Ben Carson, President Donald Trump’s Housing and Urban Development secretary, in his first remarks to the HUD staff in 2017, likened slaves to immigrants, saying they “came here in the bottom of slave ships, worked even longer, even harder for less. But they too had a dream that one day their sons, daughters, grandsons, granddaughters, great-grandsons, great-granddaughters, might pursue prosperity and happiness in this land.”

Carson told the Conservative Political Action Conference last year that welfare hurts African American communities more than slavery did, “when the government came along said, ‘There, there, you poor little thing, I’m going to take care of all your needs and started implementing policies that were destructive to the family formation.’“

Meanwhile, former NFL star Herschel Walker, running against Georgia freshman Senator Raphael G. Warnock, complete with Trump’s endorsement, touched on the next battle in the culture war when he asked if humans descended from apes “why are there still apes?” New York Times columnist Charles M. Bow said Walker had been persuaded to enter politics as part of “a callous racial calculus … To many in the GOP, his race blunts the idea that Republicans are appealing to racists, relieves the pressure on Trump supporters for supporting a racist and gives them a shot at winning more of Georgia’s Black voters.”

Royce White, a former NBA player, who is challenging incumbent Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar, claims there are satanic influences in the federal government.

Ethno-nationalist Stephen K. Bannon interviewed White at least 25 times and concluded, “Here you got a Black guy, a basketball player, in Minneapolis, that actually talks about real issues. That, I think can resonate.”

On the other hand, former Texas Republican Congressman Will Hurd does not ridicule fellow African Americans who prefer the Democratic Party. Instead, he told The Washington Post Magazine that Republicans should “grow the coalitions within the party,” the 2020 election “was lost, not stolen” and “there is need “to inspire rather than fearmonger.”

Hurd may be the kind of person CNN’s John Blake had in mind when he said in 2019 that African Americans “despise” Clarence Thomas not because he is a conservative. “If black people are so opposed to conservatives,” Blake said, “why have so many accepted black conservatives such as Booker T. Washington, Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice?”