Marin Voice: Personal brushes with names in the news paint a picture

In the “small world” department, last month’s newsmakers yielded a host of prior personal interactions.

• Harlan Crow and Clarence Thomas: Over the years, I’ve met Crow, the influential real estate developer who is now in the news for questions surrounding his influence over Supreme Court Justice Thomas. When Thomeas was nominated to the Supreme Court, I wrote a scathing op-ed predicting his role on the court and was asked to participate on a PBS NewsHour panel.

Based upon the record of his predecessor, Thurgood Marshall, who won 29 of 32 cases before the Supreme Court, nine out of 13 as solicitor general and never once reversed on the 2nd Circuit, I felt the inexperienced Thomas would be a disaster for the advancement of social justice.

Over the years, I probably spent no more than two hours with Thomas. He appears resentful of his experiences with upper middle-class Black Americans at Yale Law School. Having come from Pin Point, Georgia, Thomas seemed hellbent on fitting in with those who would mirror his opinion of himself as someone who made it on his own with no help from the affirmative action movement.

I asked Thomas why he voted to gut the Voting Rights Act. He claimed it was no longer needed.

• Tucker Carlson: Perhaps the controversial TV pundit’s conversation with me was tailored to his audience. When I met him prior to his stint on Fox News, he had me convinced he was a straight-up progressive. Further background investigation revealed he had worked for liberal cable outlets in no way displaying the conservative right-wing philosophy for which he is now so identified.

• Harry Belafonte: In 1966, to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Fish University in Nashville, Belafonte, a famed singer and actor, joined Sydney Poitier, himself a decorated actor, for a week on campus, where I was a 20-year-old junior.

Belafonte was my father’s hero. I read everything about the matinee idol and civil rights icon. In the receiving line, I asked him why he failed to cooperate with a biographer who chronicled his life. His eyes flashed and narrowed. He told me in no uncertain terms: “My private life is my own.”

I later learned that, when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, Rosa Parks felt she couldn’t bear the emotional strain of the funeral and Belafonte sent a private plane for her. He sat with her during the service. His life was a shining example of unblemished service in the cause of justice.

• Dianne Feinstein: I worked as the second administrative aide for Sen. Feinstein when she was a San Francisco supervisor. After two unsuccessful attempts at running for mayor, she was going to retire from public life. We threw a party for her at El Pirata restaurant in the Mission district. The double assassinations of then-Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk changed all that.

Having spent three decades in the U.S. Senate and temporarily felled by illness, she is looking for a graceful exit which, under normal circumstances, would be accommodated, but these aren’t normal times.

Needing a wheelchair, she returned this week. Democrats sense blood in the water, and Republicans appear to be rejoicing over the stalled Judiciary Committee logjam in confirming President Joe Biden’s appointees.

• Randall Robinson: He was a 1970 Harvard Law School classmate of mine who died recently. He established TransAfrica, the worldwide disinvestment movement aimed at dismantling the South African apartheid regime.

I would write about him every 10 years prior to our class reunions, where all the chatter would be about another classmate, Bruce Wasserstein. He was a successful financier who established First Boston and funded a building for Harvard. All Robinson did was free a nation.

• Justin Jones: I met the ousted and reappointed Tennessee state senator at my 50th Fisk reunion in 2017. He so reminds me of another 1967 Fisk grad, famed former Rep. John Lewis. It’s a shame the same issues Lewis struggled against for decades still exist today. Embers once thought dead often sleep beneath the ashes.

And here we are decades later, warming our hands by the campfire of their memories.