"Yes, unambiguously so. Clarence Thomas was born in Pin Point, Georgia, and his family were descendants of enslaved people who spoke the creole language Gullah as a first language.
Pin Point was settled in 1896 by former slaves from Ossabaw, Green, and Skidaway Islands — a self-sustaining community that created their own school and church and ran coastal industries including shrimping, crabbing, and oyster harvesting. Pin Point was home to many from the Gullah-Geechee community, including Thomas.
Thomas himself has spoken about this identity. In his own words: "When I was 16, I was sitting as the only black kid in my class, and I had grown up speaking a kind of a dialect. It's called Geechee. Some people call it Gullah now, and people praise it now. But they used to make fun of us back then... I would correct myself midsentence. I was trying to speak standard English."
The Gullah-Geechee trace their roots to the rice-growing regions of West Africa — brought as captives from Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia to the Atlantic coast, where they worked the indigo, rice, and cotton fields.
There's an interesting cultural and political footnote here: Marquetta Goodwine, known as Queen Quet among the Gullah-Geechee people, has expressed disappointment that Thomas hasn't used his platform to champion his native culture more openly, feeling he remains somewhat ashamed of it.
It's a remarkable and often overlooked biographical fact — the longest-serving current Supreme Court Justice grew up in one of the most culturally distinct and historically isolated African-descended communities in the United States, one that preserved West African language and traditions across centuries largely because of their geographic isolation along the Sea Islands and coastal lowcountry." --- Claude
