Check out this New Yorker essay by Corey Robin about Clarence Thomas, the longest-serving Justice on the U.S. Supreme Court. Here is an excerpt:
When [Justice Thomas] joined the bench, on October 19, 1991, the Soviet Union was a country, Hillary Clinton was Arkansas’s First Lady, and Donald Trump had recently declared the first of his businesses’ six bankruptcies. Since then, Thomas has written more than seven hundred opinions, staking out controversial positions on gun rights and campaign finance that have come to command Supreme Court majorities. “Thomas’s views,” the Yale law professor Akhil Reed Amar has said, “are now being followed by a majority of the Court in case after case.” That was in 2011. Today Thomas is joined on the Court by Neil Gorsuch, who frequently signs on to Thomas’s opinions, and Brett Kavanaugh.
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No matter what, he is no and will never be Thurgood Marshall
I understand your sentiment, especially since Thurgood Marshall was a legal giant and a hero to so many people, but I strongly recommend this article. It explains why Clarence Thomas is in so many ways the Anti-Thurgood Marshall. Especially relevant are the reasons for Justice Thomas’s disdain of “white liberalism”: Thomas’s hero is Malcolm X, not MLK. (And given the recent relevations about MLK’s private life and his utter moral hypocrisy, this article is more timely than ever.)