Meet Kathy Crow ’89: Philanthropist and Lightning Rod
The former lacrosse standout’s friendship with Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas stirred a national controversy
One of the civic causes Kathy Crow ’89 has donated her time, support, and money to over the past 30 years is St. Philip’s School and Community Center in south Dallas.
The school’s headmaster and executive director, Terry Flowers, enjoys sharing examples of Crow’s involvement, but two events she and her husband, Harlan Crow, facilitated stand out: when Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas visited the St. Philip’s campus in 2009, and when Thomas hosted a group of the school’s students in his Washington, D.C., chambers a year later.
“I think it stands to reason that Kathy and Harlan would have relationships with people in high places, and friendships with folks of all different walks,” says Flowers.
The connection between the Crows — Harlan and Kathy — and the Thomases — Clarence and Ginni — is a complicated one. In the past 18 months, there has been a deluge of news media coverage surrounding Clarence Thomas’ friendship with the Crows, and whether the justice breached ethics codes when he accepted gifts from Texas billionaire Harlan Crow, including travel on Crow’s private jet and superyacht and stays at the Crow family’s Adirondacks estate. ProPublica also reported in May 2023 that Crow paid for the private school tuition of Clarence Thomas’ grandnephew.
The headlines have put the Crows, particularly Harlan — who has said publicly that he’s politically conservative, although anti-Trump — at the center of a heated debate over the Supreme Court code of conduct and whether the court has become a political tool.
Of the many diverse relationships the Crows have cultivated — from presidents (including the Bushes) and politicians to teachers, nonprofit officials, and Fortune 500 executives — one such connection is with Princeton professor emeritus Cornel West *80.
West, the political activist and theologian who ran for president this November, was a guest speaker at St. Philip’s several years ago with Robert P. George, Princeton professor of politics and director of the James Madison Program. West and George went to Dallas at the request of the Crows, who are both on the James Madison Program’s board of advisers. West, 71, tells PAW that while he and the Crows may be on opposite ends of the political spectrum, he fully supports the couple’s philanthropic and civic engagement.
“I’ve always had a wonderful time with my dear sister Kathy. She’s full of life,” West says in a phone interview. “She’s a very honest human being, she’s a very embracing person. She and Harlan make a wonderful couple and duo and team. What strikes me about sister Kathy [are] two things: one, her warm embrace, and two, her love of reading. Her Princeton education is something that she builds on, there’s no doubt about it.”
PAW reached out to a swath of Crow connections — from Princeton and through professional circles — to paint a picture of her life arc. Some declined to be interviewed.
Both Harlan, 75, and Kathy Crow, 57, rarely grant media interviews, and Kathy would not specifically address the couple’s friendship with the Thomases in an email responding to PAW’s questions. She instead outlined her social life and philanthropic work.
“My intention is to always do this work with purposefulness, resolve, and an intention to genuinely help those less fortunate or in challenging circumstances,” she writes. “Harlan and I value and appreciate the many friends we have made along the way.”
Rubbing elbows with boldface names and living in one of Dallas’ most expensive homes is a long way from suburban New Jersey, where Kathy Crow spent her childhood. D Magazine last year estimated that the Crows’ mansion is worth nearly $50 million; the couple’s private library is an ornate, two-story wing that holds more than 14,000 books and scores of historical items.
“For a small-town, public school girl, attending Princeton was a dream come true,” Crow tells PAW, referring to her Moorestown, New Jersey, upbringing. “The opportunity was born out of lacrosse and field hockey athletic recruiting, but my deep enthusiasm for Princeton quickly coalesced around the diligent scholarship, stunning curriculum, and remarkable friendships to be found on campus. The friends I made at Princeton are still deeply important to me, and although miles separate us from coast to coast now, we remain close and in touch often.”
Crow, who majored in politics, was a standout lacrosse player, according to Chris Sailer, the former Princeton coach who retired in 2022 after 36 years. Sailer says Crow was part of a group of players early in Sailer’s Princeton tenure who helped transform the middling program into a Final Four participant within three seasons.
“My first year [coaching at Princeton] was definitely a building year,” Sailer says of the 1987 season. “[Kathy] was a big player for us. Her senior year, we went to the Final Four [where Princeton lost to Sailer’s alma mater, Harvard]. Kathy was a strong player, very feisty and aggressive. A tough, hard-nosed competitor, but a fun-to-coach kind of kid.”
Sailer says that although she hasn’t kept in regular communication with Crow, the two would see each other when Crow came back to campus for Reunions or other events. Sailer also says Crow has donated generously to the Princeton women’s lacrosse program.
Crow moved to Dallas not long after graduating from Princeton — “for a two-year job,” she says via email — but she ended up staying much longer. “I fell in love with a man and a new forever home,” she says.
Kathy and Harlan have three children, sons Jack (29) and Rob (26), and daughter Sarah (22), who’s a Morehead-Cain scholar at the University of North Carolina’s Kenan-Flagler Business School and set to graduate next spring. Kathy Crow is a UNC Kenan-Flagler board member, and the dean of the school, Mary Margaret (Myers) Frank, says that Crow has been “an invaluable thought partner” with regard to helping grow the school’s profile in the corporate world, and enriching the students’ overall experience.
Kathy serves on 13 boards — including at Southern Methodist University, where she earned an MBA in 1994 — and holds the title of officer for Crow Holdings, the massive Dallas real estate company run by Harlan.
“The principles I am enthusiastic about center around educational excellence and civic discourse, and the volunteer and civic work I involve myself with follow suit,” Crow says. “As a family, we are deeply committed to championing the institutions and organizations that promote and strengthen the community of Dallas and the State of Texas.”
St. Philip’s has been one of those institutions where Crow’s involvement is deeply rooted — Harlan’s father, Trammell, was one of the school’s benefactors, and the school library is named in his honor. Flowers, the headmaster, says the Crow family’s impact on the school has been “significant.”
“For them to be supportive, but more importantly, ambassadors for the great work that we are engaged in, brings about credibility, brings additional support, places an area of Dallas on the radar screen for others who have negative perceptions about the potential and promise of the neighborhood,” he says.
One time Kathy Crow invited a group of St. Philip’s students on a Crow family trip to Alaska. “The kids watched bears snatch salmon out of a river,” says Flowers. But Kathy Crow’s biggest mission with the school has been her decades-long work to revitalize the neighborhood, which has been plagued for decades by drugs, violence, prostitution, and blight.
“Kathy was boldly going where very few people would go, decades ago,” says Flowers, who has been a leader at the school since 1983.
Some of Crow’s more recent initiatives in south Dallas, according to Flowers, include bringing other professionals to the community so that “they’ll be more educated and be in a position to advocate for change.” Crow has partnered with organizations such as United to Learn, whose goals include improving the educational environment for Dallas elementary schools, and she has worked with local law enforcement and legal experts on converting “challenge properties” into prosperous ones.
On the other side of Dallas, in the affluent Highland Park neighborhood where the Crows live, their library serves as a rarefied space hosting political, charitable, and philanthropic functions. West describes the library as “an intellectual salon.”
He says that during one visit to the Crow library, the couple brought together “all these different people talking about Socrates or Martin Luther King Jr., or [Thomas] Aquinas, [Søren] Kierkegaard. It was really a beautiful thing.”
West’s friendship with the Crows has brought its share of controversy, too.
After Harlan Crow donated to West’s presidential campaign last year, there was immediate backlash, prompting West to defend Crow on X, formerly Twitter.
“Despite my deep political differences with brother Harlan Crow (who is an anti-Trump Republican), I’ve known him in a nonpolitical setting for some years and I pray for his precious family,” part of West’s Oct. 19, 2023, post reads.
West tells PAW that he was staggered by the response to Harlan Crow’s donation and the demands that he return the money.
“They said, ‘[Harlan’s] trying to manipulate you.’ No. I know brother Harlan and sister Kathy, my God,” says West. “And people said, ‘Well, you don’t say that in politics, you don’t use that kind of language.’ I don’t give a damn about what other people talk about politics. I’m a free man and I have my own views.”
“We live in such a toxic culture, so everybody distrusts everybody. Everybody is suspicious of everybody. Everybody figures that they’re manipulating and transacting.”
— CORNEL WEST *80
While West says that he and the Crows “clash intellectually all the time,” West adds that those political tussles end with a peaceful truce. West chuckles when remembering how Kathy Crow once blasted him via email.
“She wrote a lovely little email one time when I was involved in some kind of demonstration, where I [came] down so hard on the oligarchs and the plutocrats,” says West. “She was like, ‘What are you thinking about?! Wait a minute brother West!’ I told her, ‘I said the same thing in Dallas, the same thing in New York, the same thing in Washington, D.C. It has nothing to do with undermining a friendship. We’re talking about structures and institutions.’ She was very kind the next time I saw her.
“But it took a little while” to repair the disagreement, says West.
As for the Crows’ friendship with Clarence and Ginni Thomas, West says he doesn’t believe there is an ulterior motive to the Crows’ gifts, despite scrutiny from politicians such as Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), who have called for an investigation into possible ethics violations.
“It’s important that people just know who’s connected to who, and what they’re doing,” says West. “But I can say that I don’t think brother Harlan or sister Kathy are the kind of persons who extend friendships in order to manipulate them. They just don’t strike me as that kind of people.”
Still, the Crows’ gifts to the Thomases have unsettled many people. In addition, Harlan Crow owns several controversial historical relics, such as: statues of Russian dictator Joseph Stalin and Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu, among others; Third Reich memorabilia, including a signed copy of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf; and paintings by the Nazi leader.
More recently, Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) opined that both Supreme Court Justices Thomas and Samuel Alito ’72 were overstepping their bounds of power.
“The American people almost uniformly agree that the right-wing justices on the Supreme Court are completely and totally out of control,” said Jeffries during a June news conference.
Mark Paoletta, a powerful Washington attorney who has represented Ginni Thomas, and who is a longtime friend of Clarence Thomas, wrote a lengthy response to the ProPublica report in which he said that the Thomases didn’t need to report the Crow payments for Clarence Thomas’ grandnephew because he wasn’t a “dependent child.” Paoletta included a copy of a 2012 letter from the Judicial Conference that states that its committee on financial disclosure did not find any evidence of wrongdoing by Thomas.
The political back-and-forth involving her high-profile marriage to Harlan Crow is a spotlight Kathy Crow has largely avoided, instead letting her professional pursuits do the talking. West says it’s no surprise that despite those efforts, criticism and vitriol are frequently directed at the Crows.
“We live in such a toxic culture, so everybody distrusts everybody. Everybody is suspicious of everybody. Everybody figures that they’re manipulating and transacting,” says West. “The sad thing is, there’s just not that much space left in the culture for people to even understand any kind of quality relation to Kathy, Harlan, and myself.”
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