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'F*** Clarence Thomas!' Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot, Samuel Jackson, celebs lash out at justice over Roe

Mayor Lori Lightfoot yelled expletives about Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas at a Chicago Pride parade on Sunday about his vote to overturn Roe v. Wade, which were celebrated loudly by the crowd

June 28, 2022 7:25pm

Updated: June 29, 2022 9:46am

Mayor Lori Lightfoot yelled expletives about Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas at a Chicago Pride parade on Sunday about his vote to overturn Roe v. Wade, which were celebrated loudly by the crowd.

Lightfoot, who is Black and in a gay marriage, made the comments on at a weekend Pride in the Park event in Grant Park, reports ABC 7 Chicago.

In a video widely circulated on social media, she began: “If you read Clarence Thomas’ concurrent opinion, he said…” before being cut off but someone in the crowd.

“Thank you, fuck Clarence Thomas!” she responded.

The crowd erupted and the host repeated her remark: “Fuck Clarence Thomas!” But some attendees in the video seem shocked by the elected official’s vulgarity.

"He thinks that we are going to stand idly by while they take our rights," the mayor continued.

Lightfoot is likely referring to Thomas’s concurrent opinion in Friday’s ruling where he suggests reconsidering “all of the [Supreme Court’s] substantive due process precedents,” including the 2015 ruling on Overgefell v. Hodges that legalized gay marriage.

The next day, The View co-host Whoopi Goldberg suggested that the Supreme Court would revive the “three-fifths clause” that counted Black slaves as less than a person to determine seats in Congress.

“We were not in the Constitution, either,” Goldberg said, referring to herself, Thomas and other African Americans.

“We were not even people in the Constitution… You better hope that no one says you’re not in the Constitution. You’re back to being a quarter of a person, because that’s not going to work either.”

Actor Samuel L. Jackson called the Black justice “Uncle Clarence,” a pejorative term for African Americans who are overly subservient to whites, in a tweet noting Thomas did not mention Loving v. Virginia, the 1967 case that legalized interracial marriage, in his opinion.

Thomas was married to Virginia Lamp, a White woman, in 1987.

The Supreme Court’s Black conservative is no stranger to intra-racial discrimination. In his 2007 memoir, “My Grandfather’s Son,” Thomas recounts how he was bullied by elementary schoolmates in Savannah, Ga., for his inky-black skin and rural accent. Color was code for class and his schoolyard nickname was “ABC” – “America’s Blackest Child.”

Thomas was also attacked for his interracial marriage by Black liberals during his 1991 nomination to the Supreme Court.

USA Today columnist Barbara Reynolds, who is also Black, wrote at the time that “it may sound bigoted” but Thomas has “already said no to blacks; he has already said if he can’t paint himself white he’ll think white and marry a white woman.”

Thomas’s first marriage was to Kathy Grace Ambush, a black woman.