#Randolph-Macon Academy
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In 2008, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas decided to send his teenage grandnephew to Hidden Lake Academy, a private boarding school in the foothills of northern Georgia. The boy, Mark Martin, was far from home. For the previous decade, he had lived with the Justice and his wife in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. Thomas had taken legal custody of Martin when he was 6 years old and had recently told an interviewer he was “raising him as a son.”
Tuition at the boarding school ran more than $6,000 a month. But Thomas did not cover the bill. A bank statement for the school from July 2009, buried in unrelated court filings, shows the source of Martin’s tuition payment for that month: the company of billionaire real estate magnate Harlan Crow.
The payments extended beyond that month, according to Christopher Grimwood, a former administrator at the school. Crow paid Martin’s tuition the entire time he was a student there, which was about a year, Grimwood told ProPublica.
“Harlan picked up the tab,” said Grimwood, who got to know Crow and the Thomases and had access to school financial information through his work as an administrator.
Before and after his time at Hidden Lake, Martin attended a second boarding school, Randolph-Macon Academy in Virginia. “Harlan said he was paying for the tuition at Randolph-Macon Academy as well,” Grimwood said, recalling a conversation he had with Crow during a visit to the billionaire’s Adirondacks estate.
ProPublica interviewed Martin, his former classmates and former staff at both schools. The exact total Crow paid for Martin’s education over the years remains unclear. If he paid for all four years at the two schools, the price tag could have exceeded $150,000, according to public records of tuition rates at the schools.
Thomas did not report the tuition payments from Crow on his annual financial disclosures. Several years earlier, Thomas disclosed a gift of $5,000 for Martin’s education from another friend. It is not clear why he reported that payment but not Crow’s.
The tuition payments add to the picture of how the Republican megadonor has helped fund the lives of Thomas and his family.
“You can’t be having secret financial arrangements,” said Mark W. Bennett, a retired federal judge appointed by President Bill Clinton. Bennett said he was friendly with Thomas and declined to comment for the record about the specifics of Thomas’ actions. But he said that when he was on the bench, he wouldn’t let his lawyer friends buy him lunch.
Thomas did not respond to questions. In response to previous ProPublica reporting on gifts of luxury travel, he said that the Crows “are among our dearest friends” and that he understood he didn’t have to disclose the trips.
ProPublica sent Crow a detailed list of questions and his office responded with a statement that did not dispute the facts presented in this story.
“Harlan Crow has long been passionate about the importance of quality education and giving back to those less fortunate, especially at-risk youth,” the statement said. “It’s disappointing that those with partisan political interests would try to turn helping at-risk youth with tuition assistance into something nefarious or political.” The statement added that Crow and his wife have “supported many young Americans” at a “variety of schools, including his alma mater.” Crow went to Randolph-Macon Academy.
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Crow did not address a question about how much he paid in total for Martin’s tuition. Asked if Thomas had requested the support for either school, Crow’s office responded, “No.”
Last month, ProPublica reported that Thomas accepted luxury travel from Crow virtually every year for decades, including international superyacht cruises and private jet flights around the world. Crow also paid money to Thomas and his relatives in an undisclosed real estate deal, ProPublica found. After he purchased the house where Thomas’ mother lives, Crow poured tens of thousands of dollars into improving the property. And roughly 15 years ago, Crow donated much of the budget of a political group founded by Thomas’ wife, which paid her a $120,000 salary.
“This is way outside the norm. This is way in excess of anything I’ve seen,” said Richard Painter, former chief White House ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush, referring to the cascade of gifts over the years.
Painter said that when he was at the White House, an official who’d taken what Thomas had would have been fired: “This amount of undisclosed gifts? You’d want to get them out of the government.”
A federal law passed after Watergate requires Justices and other officials to publicly report most gifts. Ethics law experts told ProPublica they believed Thomas was required by law to disclose the tuition payments because they appear to be a gift to him.
Justices also must report many gifts to their spouses and dependent children. The law’s definition of dependent child is narrow, however, and likely would not apply to Martin since Thomas was his legal guardian, not his parent. The best case for not disclosing Crow’s tuition payments would be to argue the gifts were to Martin, not Thomas, experts said.
But that argument was far-fetched, experts said, because minor children rarely pay their own tuition. Typically, the legal guardian is responsible for the child’s education.
“The most reasonable interpretation of the statute is that this was a gift to Thomas and thus had to be reported. It’s common sense,” said Kathleen Clark, an ethics law expert at Washington University in St. Louis. “It’s all to the financial benefit of Clarence Thomas.”
Martin, now in his 30s, told ProPublica he was not aware that Crow paid his tuition. But he defended Thomas and Crow, saying he believed there was no ulterior motive behind the real estate magnate’s largesse over the decades. “I think his intentions behind everything is just a friend and just a good person,” Martin said.
Crow has long been an influential figure in pro-business conservative politics. He has given millions to efforts to move the law and the judiciary to the right and serves on the boards of think tanks that publish scholarship advancing conservative legal theories.
Crow has denied trying to influence the Justice but has said he extended hospitality to him just as he has to other dear friends. From the start, their relationship has intertwined expensive gifts and conservative politics. In a recent interview with The Dallas Morning News, Crow recounted how he first met Thomas. In 1996, the Justice was scheduled to give a speech in Dallas for an anti-regulation think tank. Crow offered to fly him there on his private jet. “During that flight, we found out we were kind of simpatico,” the billionaire said.
The following year, the Thomases began to discuss taking custody of Martin. His father, Thomas’ nephew, had been imprisoned in connection with a drug case. Thomas has written that Martin’s situation held deep resonance for him because his own father was absent and his grandparents had taken him in “under very similar circumstances.”
Thomas had an adult son from a previous marriage, but he and wife, Ginni, didn’t have children of their own. They pitched Martin’s parents on taking the boy in.
“Thomas explained that the boy would have the best of everything — his own room, a private school education, lots of extracurricular activities,” journalists Kevin Merida and Michael Fletcher reported in their biography of Thomas.
Thomas gained legal custody of Martin and became his legal guardian around January 1998, according to court records.
Martin, who had been living in Georgia with his mother and siblings, moved to Virginia, where he lived with the Justice from the ages of 6 to 19, he said.
Living with the Thomases came with an unusual perk: lavish travel with Crow and his family. Martin told ProPublica that he and Thomas vacationed with the Crows “at least once a year” throughout his childhood.
That included visits to Camp Topridge, Crow’s private resort in the Adirondacks, and two cruises on Crow’s superyacht, Martin said. On a trip in the Caribbean, Martin recalled riding jet skis off the side of the billionaire’s yacht.
Roughly 20 years ago, Martin, Thomas and the Crows went on a cruise on the yacht in Russia and the Baltics, according to Martin and two other people familiar with the trip. The group toured St. Petersburg in a rented helicopter and visited the Yusupov Palace, the site of Rasputin’s murder, said one of the people. They were joined by Chris DeMuth, then the president of the conservative think tank the American Enterprise Institute. (Thomas’ trips with Crow to the Baltics and the Caribbean have not previously been reported.)
Thomas reconfigured his life to balance the demands of raising a child with serving on the high court. He began going to the Supreme Court before 6 a.m. so he could leave in time to pick Martin up after class and help him with his homework. By 2001, the justice had moved Martin to private school out of frustration with the Fairfax County public school system’s lax schedule, The American Lawyer magazine reported.
For high school, Thomas sent Martin to Randolph-Macon Academy, a military boarding school 75 miles west of Washington, D.C., where he was in the class of 2010. The school, which sits on a 135-acre campus in the Shenandoah Valley, charged between $25,000 to $30,000 a year. Martin played football and basketball, and the Justice sometimes visited for games.
Randolph-Macon was also Crow’s alma mater. Thomas and Crow visited the campus in April 2007 for the dedication of an imposing bronze sculpture of the Air Force Honor Guard, according to the school magazine. Crow donated the piece to Randolph-Macon, where it is a short walk from Crow Hall, a classroom building named after the Dallas billionaire’s family.
Martin sometimes chafed at the strictures of military school, according to people at Randolph-Macon at the time, and he spent his junior year at Hidden Lake Academy, a therapeutic boarding school in Georgia. Hidden Lake boasted one teacher for every 10 students and activities ranging from horseback riding to canoeing. Those services came at an added cost. At the time, a year of tuition was roughly $73,000, plus fees.
The July 2009 bank statement from Hidden Lake was filed in a bankruptcy case for the school, which later went under. The document shows that Crow Holdings LLC wired $6,200 to the school that month, the exact cost of the month’s tuition. The wire is marked “Mark Martin” in the ledger.
Crow’s office said in its statement that Crow’s funding of students’ tuition has “always been paid solely from personal funds, sometimes held at and paid through the family business.”
Grimwood, the administrator at Hidden Lake, told ProPublica that Crow wired the school money once a month to pay Martin’s tuition fees. Grimwood had multiple roles on the campus, including overseeing an affiliated wilderness program. He said he was speaking about the payments because he felt the public should know about outside financial support for Supreme Court Justices. Martin returned to Randolph-Macon his senior year.
Thomas has long been one of the less wealthy members of the Supreme Court. Still, when Martin was in high school, he and Ginni Thomas had income that put them comfortably in the top echelon of Americans.
In 2006 for example, the Thomases brought in more than $500,000 in income. The following year, they made more than $850,000 from Clarence Thomas’ salary from the Court, Ginni Thomas’ pay from the Heritage Foundation and book payments for the Justice’s memoir.
It appears that at some point in Martin’s childhood, Thomas was paying for private school himself. Martin told ProPublica that Thomas sold his Corvette — “his most prized car” — to pay for a year of tuition, although he didn’t remember when that occurred.
In 2002, a friend of Thomas’ from the RV community who owned a Florida pest control company, Earl Dixon, offered Thomas $5,000 to help defray the costs of Martin’s education. Thomas’ disclosure of that earlier gift, several experts said, could be viewed as evidence that the Justice himself understood he was required to report tuition aid from friends.
“At first, Thomas was worried about the propriety of the donation,” Thomas biographers Merida and Fletcher recounted. “He agreed to accept it if the contribution was deposited directly into a special trust for Mark.” In his annual filing, Thomas reported the money as an “education gift to Mark Martin.”
Do you have any tips on the Supreme Court or the judiciary? Josh Kaplan can be reached by email at [email protected] and by Signal or WhatsApp at 734-834-9383. Justin Elliott can be reached by email at [email protected] or by Signal or WhatsApp at 774-826-6240.
#us politics#news#ProPublica#2023#us supreme court#ethics rules#ethics violations#supreme court ethics violations#scotus#justice clarence thomas#ginni thomas#harlan crow#Mark Martin#Christopher Grimwood#Randolph-Macon Academy#Hidden Lake Academy#Mark W. Bennett#Richard Painter#Kathleen Clark#The Dallas Morning News#Kevin Merida#Michael Fletcher#Camp Topridge#Adirondacks#superyacht#russia#Chris DeMuth#The American Lawyer#Crow Holdings LLC#heritage foundation
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Recent Acquisition - Ephemera Collection
Woodberry vs. Randolph-Macon Academy,
Hanes Field, 2:00 PM, Oct 27, 1956
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Thoma$ must go!
Justice Thomas and his wife made immeasurable personal and financial sacrifices and poured every ounce of their lives and hearts into giving their great nephew a chance to succeed. In the summer of 2006, the Thomases were struggling to find a school where they could send their great nephew. In discussing these challenges with their dear friends, Harlan and Kathy Crow, Harlan recommended that the Thomases consider one more option: sending their great nephew to Randolph Macon Academy. Harlan had attended Randolph Macon, and he thought the school would be a good fit.
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Several scenes from The 91st Annual Shenandoah Apple Blossom Festival Parade.
#Virginia#Winchester#Shenandoah Apple Blossom Festival Parade#Shenandoah Apple Blossom Festival#Apple Blossom Festival#Apple Blossom Festival Parade#Festival#Parade#Marching Band#Randolph Macon Academy#Randolph Macon Academy Marching Band#Randolph Macon#Wells Fargo Stagecoach#Wells Fargo#Bagpipes#Pipe Band#The Green Turtle#Cut Kids#Col Patrick V Kinsman#Mrs Kinsman#City National Bank#Stuart M Perry Inc
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COMING OUT TO HIS PARENTS - SELF PARA
Hunter had graduated. He graduated Military school and he was ready to be who he truly was, nothing was getting in the way of that. Even his parents were the ones who sent him to Military school, they still expected him to go to law school and become a successful lawyer. That was not his passion one bit. Not anymore.
As he walked into their home in Virginia, his parents were still off with him since the incident at Dalton. He had done his time with community service and he worked hard at Randolph-Macon Academy.
So as he shrugged off his jacket, he watched his parents walk in as well, dressed in their best outfits of course to keep up appearances but he hardly got any word from them when he graduated. Hunter shook his head when he followed them into the kitchen, his father headed for the bar on the side and his mother just checking messages before he spoke.
“I’m gay”
His father stopped pouring his drink, looking up at him in shock and anger, whilst his mother just looked at Hunter as if he was from another world. Hunter’s father took a breath before he sipped from his drink, shaking his head “You know when I found out you had been recruited to that all boys school, I worried that it might...entice you but you were on a war path, yeah you dealt with steroids but we got you minimum punishment and enrolled in this military school to give you the best chance at getting into law school, but you...you just throw it all back in our faces with this?”
Hunter didn’t say a word before his mother spoke up “You need to leave Hunter”. Without another word, Hunter grabbed his coat before he spoke up himself.
“I’ve already enrolled into the US Air Force, I’ll be back tomorrow for my things”
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Bertram Hartman Modernist Still Life, 1930s.
Bertram Hartman was an American painter who was born in Junction City, Kansas on April 18, 1882. He studied at the Art Institute of Chicago, and at the Royal Academy in Munich and Paris. He was a member of the Chicago Society of Artists, National Society of Mural Painters, American Society of Painters, Sculptors and Gravers; and American Water Colour Society. Hartman exhibited at the following: Panama-Pacific Exposition in 1915, Carnegie Institute in 1933, Art Institute of Chicago from 1926 to 1934, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Brooklyn Museum, Grand Central Palace and in South America in 1940. His artwork is held in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Brooklyn Museum and Randolph-Macon College for Women.
Hartman also completed a mural for the United States Post Office in Dayton, Tennessee. he died in New York City on July 9, 1960.
(via eBay)
#art#modernist painting#bertram hartman#1930s#abstract#still life#artwork#american artist#american painter#oil on canvas
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Football game day ready with Virginia Union Universit, Randolph Macon and Glen Allen High School. (In service for Academy Express with Randolph Macon) https://www.instagram.com/p/CVDnRwqDySy/?utm_medium=tumblr
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Top lacrosse video today: Penn St, Princeton and UPenn lacrosse commit shootaround
Top lacrosse news
„.@ConnectLAX boys’ recruit: Salesianum School (DE) 2022 ATT Sutty commits to Randolph-Macon” – phillylacrosse
„.@mainLineSpoertsC boys’ recruit: Arcadia gets commitment from Brewster Academy (N.H.) 2022 ATT/MF Cullen” – phillylacrosse
„.@LongstrethLAX girls’ recruit: Owen J. Roberts 2023 ATT Doyle commits to Liberty” – phillylacrosse
„.@LongstrethLAX girls’ recruit: Great Valley 2023 goalie Manning commits to Penn State” – phillylacrosse
„Explaining the Top 25 Lacrosse Heads” – laxallstars
Best tweets – 2021.10.01.
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Evans was born in Marion, South Carolina, the third son of Thomas and Jane Beverly (née Daniel) Evans. He briefly attended Randolph-Macon College before receiving an appointment to West Point from John C. Calhoun. After graduation from the United States Military Academy in 1848, Evans served on the western frontier with the dragoons and cavalry before resigning in 1861 to enter Confederate service. He was commissioned a colonel and commanded a small brigade at the First Battle of Bull Run, where it was said his command went far toward saving the day for the South. During the thick of the fight, he was everywhere, closely followed by an aide carrying a "barrelito" (small barrel) of Evans' favorite whiskey on his back.
A number of examples of Evans' good tactical leadership and bravery in battle are recorded. However, his abrasive personality and his passion for intoxicating beverages led to his constant difficulties with colleagues and superiors.
He was given command of a brigade of Mississippi and Virginia troops and assigned to guard the upper fords of the Potomac River, above Washington, D.C.. In October 1861, a Union force crossed the river near Leesburg, Virginia, and at the Battle of Ball's Bluff Evans' command drove the enemy into the Potomac River, inflicting great loss. Evans was promoted to brigadier general to be effective from the day of the battle.
He was then sent to assist in defending the coastal areas just south of Charleston. He was placed in command of the First Military District which included Secessionville, just days before the battle there, but played little part in it. In July 1862, he was given command of a newly-formed brigade of South Carolina troops and led it to Richmond to join Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia.
Evans' Brigade participated in the battles of Second Manassas, South Mountain and Antietam in 1862 and was then assigned to Eastern North Carolina to oppose a major Union raid on Kinston and Goldsboro.
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Reposted from @blm757 (@get_regrann) - This is Antonio L. Biggs. A phenomenal football player, son, and student. He aspired to attend college, play football, graduate college and make his mother proud. All of that was snatched away from him on 9/29/17 while attending a college visit at Randolph Macon College. Antonio L. Biggs was taken advantage of at 19 years old by his 22 year old tour guide. She lured him in, flirted with him, hung with him all that day- even after his tour had ended. She even had him to come over to her apartment after just hanging with him at the England Street Tavern in Ashland at 1am in the morning. The tour guide was not single, she had a boyfriend who also attended RMC. She couldn't let him know what she had done that day especially the fact that she had consented to have sex with Antonio.... What she did to cover up her sin left Antonio L. Biggs void of his college scholarship at Valley Forge Military Academy and fighting for his life.... Commonwealth of Va vs. Antonio L. Biggs Story #FreeHimNow #WeNeedYourSupport #BlackLivesMatter #FreeAntonioBiggs #Phoebus - #regrann https://www.instagram.com/p/B5GLV7vnCTv/?igshid=1iz04sv2y6n3t
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This is Antonio L. Biggs. A phenomenal football player, son, and student. He aspired to attend college, play football, graduate college and make his mother proud. All of that was snatched away from him on 9/29/17 while attending a college visit at Randolph Macon College. Antonio L. Biggs was taken advantage of at 19 years old by his 22 year old tour guide. She lured him in, flirted with him, hung with him all that day- even after his tour had ended. She even had him to come over to her apartment after just hanging with him at the England Street Tavern in Ashland at 1am in the morning. The tour guide was not single, she had a boyfriend who also attended RMC. She couldn't let him know what she had done that day especially the fact that she had consented to have sex with Antonio.... What she did to cover up her sin left Antonio L. Biggs void of his college scholarship at Valley Forge Military Academy and fighting for his life.... Commonwealth of Va vs. Antonio L. Biggs Story #FreeHimNow #WeNeedYourSupport #BlackLivesMatter #FreeAntonioBiggs https://www.instagram.com/p/B5Bccdxnu_l/?igshid=qtkif3eewhy5
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Recent Acquisition - Postcard Collection
Randolph Macon Academy, Front Royal, VA. Chas. L. Melton, A.M. Principal
Postmarked September 1911
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Just a little history while on my walk through Bronx Park. Here is what the sign says: "Olinville playground bears the name of the Bronx neighborhood of Olinville, named after the author, professor and Methodist bishop, Stephen Olin (1797-1851). A tiny village that emerged in the 1840s as a result of the New York and Harlem Railroad, Olinville originally began as two distinct settlements, Olinville No.1 and Olinville No.2, separated by Olin Avenue. The villages were eventually incorporated between 1852 and 1854. Stephen Olin was born in Leicester, Vermont. He became an instructor at Tabernacle Academy in South Carolina in 1820, was admitted on trial as a preacher to the Methodist Episcopal Church in 1824, and was ordained in 1826. He became professor of ethics and belles-lettres at the University of Georgia in 1827, and from 1834 to 1837, he served as the first President of Randolph-Macon College, a recently founded Methodist institution in Virginia. Renowned as one of the most powerful and fervent preachers of his day, he served as President of Wesleyan University in Connecticut from 1842 to 1851. He wrote with the same zeal with which he preached, contributing to the Christian Advocate and Journal and writing numerous books. Travels in Egypt, Arabia, Petraea, and the Holy Land was published in 1843, but the majority of his works were released posthumously. These include The Works of Stephen Olin (1852), Life and Letters (1853), Greece and the Golden Horn (1854), and College Life and Practice (1867)." #StephenOlin #Olinville #Bronx #BronxHistory #BronxPark #NewYorkCityHistory #NYCHistory #NewYorkHistory #NYC #TouristinNYC #History #Historia #Histoire #HistorySisco (at Bronx Park)
#stephenolin#historysisco#newyorkcityhistory#nyc#bronxhistory#olinville#historia#touristinnyc#histoire#history#newyorkhistory#bronx#bronxpark#nychistory
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Working for Summer – Randolph-Macon Academy’s Flight Camp
Working for Summer – Randolph-Macon Academy’s Flight Camp Business, News, Sports
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Honestly, at this point I can almost say my research is finished.
I will likely never learn specific details about this man’s death past what I already know; he was a replacement there for five days. Not to mention that it’s likely there’s, at the maximum, one or two veterans left alive from his company, they likely wouldn’t remember him.
He had no descendants. His brother did not have any children with his wife. His sister’s single child died in a fatal car accident in 1963. His cousins are damned near impossible to track.
The only markers left on earth to signify Henry Hatcher existed is his grave, a scant few files in the National and St. Louis Archives, a memorial wall of names at Randolph-Macon Academy, a memorial plaque at Fishburne Military School, and his name on one of Virginia Tech’s memorial pylons.
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Emmert leads STAB to blowout victory
Quarterback Chase Emmert accounted for five touchdowns to lead the St. Anne’s-Belfield football team to a 66-26 victory over Randolph-Macon Academy on Saturday.
Emmert leads STAB to blowout victory
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