Thomas Clarence had been a controversial member of the United States Supreme Court since he was nominated in 1991. The only African-American justice on the Court, Thomas has been controversial in his views on affirmative action. However, before judging a man, it is important to walk a mile in his shoes. In his autobiography, Thomas gives America the chance to do just that. Born on June 23, 1948, Clarence Thomas was the second child of M.C. Thomas and Leola Williams. However, for all intensive purposes these were not his parents. Thomas didn't meet his father until he was nine and that was just a brief experience which ended without unfulfilled promises of watches as gifts for him and his brother (Thomas, 01). His mother was not absent, but was eventually forced to have her sons move in with her parents because couldn't properly support them. Thomas lived the first 6 years of his life in Pinpoint, Georgia, a very poor community whose existence revolved around the waters of the Shipyard Creek, by which it is surrounded on three sides. Dinner was whatever could be pulled out of the river, and almost all the work done by residents of Pinpoint was water-related. Although poor, Thomas found life enjoyable in Pinpoint as there was never any shortage of food and the wetlands provided an endless playground. But when his family's house burned down in 1954, Thomas "moved from the comparative safety and cleanliness of rural poverty to the foulest of urban squalor;" Savannah (Thomas, 6). Here Thomas, along with his mother and brother, lived in a tiny apartment that was unclean and unpleasant. The surrounding area was dangerous. In his autobiography, Thomas recalls sirens often blaring in the night (Thomas,7). He has never forgotten the poverty which he experienced as a little boy. His views on affirmative action are based in large part on the fact that he was able
to pull himself up by the bootstraps and therefore others should be able to as well. Additionally, the way the women working as servants in the houses of affluent whites accepted their lives and never complained shaped his view of the women's rights movement. When he was head of EEOC he attended a meeting of Women Employed, a group pursuing equal rights for women in the workforce, specifically equal pay. He wrote, "I couldn't understand how angry they seemed to be about their lot in life. How could these well-off white women be more bitter than the poor blacks and Hispanics? (Thomas,165)" At this time, Thomas had started to skip school and was meandering towards an unremarkable life. To learn how to pull himself up by the bootstraps and become something special, Thomas needed a role model who believed in hard work and discipline above all else. A year after moving into Savannah he was told that he and his brother were moving in with their grandparents, and thus he found that role model. Myers Anderson, grandfather of Clarence Thomas and the man he called Daddy, was a self made man. Having just a third grade education and being closer to illiterate than anything else, Anderson built a business delivering wood and fuel that was just lucrative enough to support him and his family. He was a man that believed in doing things himself; he had built his own house and several others. Anderson immediately brought discipline to the life of Thomas. The first morning in Anderson's house, young Clarence was informed that "the damn vacation is over (Thomas,12)." That attitude never changed as Thomas and his brother were expected to do certain chores without complaint and their lives became micromanaged by their grandfather. Sayings like "the door swings both ways" and "Old Man Can't is dead--I helped bury him" replaced hugs and affection (Thomas,13). "He never praised us, just as he never hugged us... our
encounters with his belt or switch were far from infrequent (Thomas,12)." Although harsh, Anderson was fair. "He added he would never tell us to do anything he said, but to do as he did--and he kept his word (Thomas,13)." Thomas was clearly shaped by Myers Anderson, after all the title of his autobiography is "My Grandfather's Son." "He was the hero of my life," writes Thomas. "What I am is what he made me (Thomas,2)." Under the watchful eye of his grandfather, Thomas began to taking schooling seriously. He was enrolled in a catholic school, St. Benedict the Moor Grammar School. Schooling was the only thing that took priority over work, but there really wasn't much conflict between the two since Anderson believed both could and would be done. The Thomas brothers joined Anderson on his early morning delivery rounds in a new, heaterless truck. The heater was removed because heat would only make them lazy according to the only person that mattered. In the summer when school was out, the three men of the house would live and work on a farm that Anderson acquired strictly to keep the boys busy over the summer. "The family farm and our unheated oil truck became the most important classrooms, the schools in which Daddy passed on the wisdom he had acquired in the course of a long life...Despite the hardships he had faced, there was no bitterness or self pity in his heart (Thomas,26)." On the weekends, the family would attend church where Thomas's studies to become an altar would mark the beginning of a vocation. St. Benedict's was the first stop in a long line of Catholic schools for Clarence Thomas. Anderson told Thomas to believe that his teachers were always right at school just as Anderson was always right at home (Thomas,14). This is reflected in his current believe that students in public schools should not have the right of free speech. After St.
Benedict's came St. Pius X, the only Catholic school for African-Americans in the area. It was in taking his entrance exam for high school that Thomas was first challenged to be something more than average. After he received an exceptionally high score on the test, Sister Mary Virgilius, his teacher, who knew he was getting good grades with minimal effort, told him he was lazy (Thomas,16). He should strive for excellent, not settle for good. Thomas's stay at St. Pius X was not long, he would soon forgo it in order to join a seminary, but the time he did spend there still may influence his behavior. Often Thomas's remarkable silence during oral arguments in the Supreme Court has been noted. In the 06-07 session he didn't ask a lawyer a single question (Toobin, 05). Thomas claimed in a New York Times interview, and mentions in his book, that he was made fun of for the dialect he spoke so he started to avoid speaking and developed the habit of listening (Lewis, 01). A more cynical view of Thomas suggests that his silence has more to do with a dislike for oral arguments, considering them a pointless formality. It is suggested that he already has his mind made up by the time oral arguments occur (Merida, Fletcher, 126). Thomas left St. Pius X to pursue priesthood at St. John Vianney. Thomas was one of the first blacks admitted to the school and the experience of being an overwhelming minority was a culture shock. What made it harder was that being classmates with white boys was not a normal black/white interaction for the south at the time. In most situations the second class status of blacks where so accepted that no unpleasantness was necessary. However, now Thomas was interacting as an equal, and some unpleasantness followed. One instance that stands out in Thomas's memory is when a student passed him a folded note that said "I like Martin Luther King" on one side
and "DEAD" on the other (Thomas,35). Although some students treated Thomas disrespectfully, his overall experience was manageable and his focus was not on race but on the increased work load at St. John Vianney. Thomas battled with feelings of inadequacy and doubts about his intelligence. To overcome them, he worked harder and harder. Meanwhile, Thomas's penchant for listening rather than talking was reinforced when one priest told him that to avoid being viewed as inferior he would have to speak Standard English. The priest was trying to be helpful, he said the same thing to white students with accents, but it hurt Thomas deeply, and his silence mimicked his pain in depth (Thomas,34). As his grades began to excel he gained the respect of his peers but felt that his education set him apart from his friends and family in Savannah. He found guidance in the poem of Robert Frost, "The Road Not Taken." Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--/ I took the one less traveled by,/ and that has made all the difference (Thomas,37). The most important things Thomas took away from St. John Vianney were the respect of his peers, earned through the merit of his grades, and the experience of entering an all white school and surviving. These two experiences would give him an advantage when attending other predominately white schools. After graduation from St. John Vianney in 1967, Thomas and six other members of his class went to Kansas City to attend Immaculate Conception Seminary. Thomas was already having doubts about his commitment to priesthood and it was at Immaculate Conception that his concerns would come to a head. He felt the constant force of passive-aggressive racism and it bothered him. The fact that the Church had nothing to say about racism while it had everything to say about issues like abortion bothered Thomas. Already considering dropping out, Thomas was pushed over the edge when
Martin Luther King Jr. was shot and he heard was of his fellow students announced that he hoped King would die. Dropping out was made extra difficult because his grandfather had told him not to fail, not to give up, and when he did, his grandfather kicked him out of the house. In a short period of time, Clarence Thomas had become estranged from the two guiding lights in his life, god and Myers Anderson. That same year, Bobby Kennedy was assassinated. Thomas had fallen so far that he was living with his mother in the same terrible apartment he had left behind so long ago. Thomas began to see things in a whole new light, he saw the injustices as if for the first time and it angered him. "I knew what was wrong, who to blame for it, and what to do about it. I was an angry black man," wrote Thomas (Thomas,48). Thomas's subsequent move from the Deep South to Holy Cross in Massachusetts reflected his dramatic shift in political ideals, ideals completely opposite the ones he held at any other time in his life. When Thomas arrived at Holy Cross he immersed himself in the small black population there. Furious at the situation of the black community in America, everything became about race. "Racism had become the answer to all my problems, the trump card that won every argument (Thomas,52)." However, Thomas's left wing phase didn't last long. After taking place in a protest of America's domestic political prisoners that turned into a riot in his sophomore year, Thomas sought the comfort of the church and prayed to be free of the rage that had taken over his life. During junior year he began to separate himself from liberal politics. He started to believe that blacks should be left alone to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. However, he felt he couldn't voice these opinions because he was obliged to follow a certain political stream of thinking that all blacks were supposed to have.
Within days of graduating from Holy Cross, Thomas married Kathy Ambush, a fellow student at Holy Cross who was two years younger. His grandfather refused to attend the ceremony even when Thomas offered to pay for his ticket, citing a need to stay on the farm and tend to the animals. This deepened the divide between the two that had come about during Thomas' liberal years. This will be pretty much the only time Kathy Ambush will be mentioned except again when Thomas leaves her. One of the more shocking things about the next ten years of Thomas' life as described by him in his autobiography is the total lack of any details about Ambush. She is only in mentioned passing and whenever Thomas has to move for career reasons, he never mentions her opinions on the situation, just his reasons for needing a change. She is presented as a woman fully without thoughts on anything, an interesting presentation of a woman who was very well educated. Yale was the next stop in Thomas' education. Here his political views truly began to take shape. It was at Yale that Thomas began to despise government interference in the lives of blacks. He felt affirmative action only caused black students to be judged by different standards. To prove himself worthy of being at Yale, Thomas tried to go above and beyond the call of duty, taking the hardest classes and overloading his schedule. His mind was also shaped by discussions with conservative friend John Bolton. Bolton asked "as a member of a group that had been treated shabbily by the majority in this country, why would you want to give the government more power over your personal life?" It reminded Thomas of his grandfather explaining why he never went to public assistance. Anderson had responded that it would take away his manhood, the government could come into his home and do what they wanted (Thomas,73).
Thomas concluded "real freedom meant independence from government intrusion, which in turn meant that you had to take responsibility for your own decisions. When the government assumes that responsibility, it takes away your freedom--and wasn't freedom the very thing for which blacks in America were fighting (Thomas,73)?" When Thomas was presented with a son Jamal on February15, 1973, he started looking at issues from the perspective of a father. The controversy of busing in Boston caught his eye. He viewed busing as "a harebrained social experiment," that resulting in putting black kids in racist dangerous situations in primarily white schools (Thomas,79). By the time he graduated Yale, Thomas was a conservative, even if only privately. A law degree from Yale was supposed to lead to big money in big firms but Thomas struggled to find work. Toting their Ivy League education, most of his classmates found job offers easy to come by but Thomas was turned down by law firms in Atlanta, Washington, and Los Angeles. Thomas believed the discrepancy to be because his degree was tarnished by affirmative action. He put a fifteen cent sticker on his law degree because he had decided that's all a tainted degree was worth (Thomas,). Apparently it never occurred to him that his skin color was his problem and that he was up against the exact kind of racism that affirmative action was designed to fight. In the end, these rejections from high power law firms would shape the rest of his life because he was forced to find work with John Danforth, Missouri's attorney general. Danforth offered a job to Thomas, and Thomas, impressed with Danforth's honesty and sincerity, accepted the job. Danforth promised Clarence that there was plenty of room at the top, even for a black man from Pin Point, Georgia. Thomas had his doubts; little did he know
that it would be Danforth that would be the one to build the stairs to take Thomas to the top. From graduation in 1974 until 1978, Thomas worked for Danforth and then for a private company. Two things were revealed to him. One was the writings of Thomas Sowell, which he loved; the other was the idea of the "golden handcuffs," which he hated. While working for Danforth, Thomas read Sowell's book Race and Economics. Thomas saw in the book his own views put out clearly and public. In his autobiography he quotes Race and Economics. "Perhaps the greatest dilemma in the attempts to raise ethnic minority income is that those methods which have historically proved successful--self-reliance, work skills, education, business experience--are all slow developing, while those methods which are more direct and immediate--job quotas, charity, subsidies, preferential treatment--tend to undermine self-reliance and pride of achievement in the long run. If the history of American ethnic groups shows anything, it is how large a role has been played by attitudes--and particularly attitudes of selfreliance (Thomas,106). Thomas sees himself as someone who made it based on self reliance. However he seems to forget that he is not truly a poor boy from Pin Point, Georgia, but a lower middle class boy from Savanna. Thomas was given a role model, a clean safe home, and private school education. He had many advantages that he now suggests should not be given to others because it undermines their pride of achievement and yet Thomas seems to have plenty of pride in his achievements. All this aside, Thomas saw Race and Economics as
a guiding light and seeing it praised in the preeminent republican newspaper of the time made him realize black republican was not an oxymoron. The other defining experience of this 4 year period was when he was in private law. Thomas had money for the first time, and even purchased his first house. However he found himself dissatisfied with the state of affairs in America and longed to have an affect on the world. "I could feel the golden handcuffs of a comfortable but unfulfilling life snapping on my wrists. I had to quit now--or I never would," wrote Thomas (Thomas,119). So when an opportunity arose to work once again for Danforth, this time in Washington, Thomas didn't hesitate to uproot his family and move to Washington. Arriving in Washington in 1978, Thomas began the climb up the political ladder, both professional and philosophical. Thomas became an outright Republican in the next ten years in Washington. Meetings with leading black republicans of the time, as well as his experiences in the Department of Education solidified his conservative views. By 1980 he was a registered republican. Professionally, Thomas went from staffer for Danforth to assistant secretary for civil rights in the Department of Education to head of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Anita Hill worked for Thomas at both the EEOC and Department of Education. He was widely regarded to have done an excellent job at EEOC so further promotion was no surprise (Toobin, 03). It was just a surprise when in 1989 Thomas was nominated to be a judge for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Thomas hadn't spent anytime in a court room since he worked for Danforth in Jefferson City, 13 years previous. Thomas' rapid assent through the ranks most certainly had something to do with his race. "In 1989, [Thomas] was hardly an obvious candidate for the court of appeals for the District of
Columbia Circuit, which is generally regarded as second in importance to the Supreme Court. Just 41 years old, Thomas had never tried a case, or argued an appeal, in any federal court....He was, in short, a black conservative in an Administration with very few of them. That's why he got the job," writes Jeffrey Toobin of the New Yorker (Toobin, 03). In his book, Thomas writes that he detested being at Yale because of his race, but now he makes no mention of how his race may have played a role in his rapid ascent through the political ranks. The rapid ascension didn't stop there, as on July 1, 1991, after only a year and a half on the bench, Thomas was nominated by President Bush to the United States Supreme Court. Bush had asked him if he could hand the confirmation process and he had responded that he had done it four times already, what was one more. However, nothing could prepare Thomas for the storm that lay ahead, as his confirmation hearing would turn into a debate for all of America, and for ever link the name Anita Hill to his. Liberal organizations across the country protested Thomas' appointment. Worried about his previously stated dislike for affirmative action and a probable dissent to Roe v. Wade, they brought up how the American Bar Association only found Thomas to be qualified, not well qualified (Mears, 01). The hearings were not friendly, but they didn't achieve their full level of intensity until Anita Hill came forward saying that Thomas had sexually harassed her. Hill alleged that at the Department of Education and EEOC Thomas made inappropriate comments: "He spoke about acts that he had seen in pornographic films involving such matters as women having sex with animals and films showing group sex or rape scenes....On several occasions, Thomas told me graphically of his own sexual
prowess....Thomas was drinking a Coke in his office, he got up from the table at which we were working, went over to his desk to get the Coke, looked at the can and asked, 'Who has put pubic hair on my Coke?' (University of Virginia Library, 08)." In his book, Thomas denies that there was any corroborating evidence. However, four other employees of Thomas testified that they remembered Hill complaining of sexual harassment at the time it was supposed to have taken place. In addition, Angel Wright described similar behavior from Thomas, but for various reasons was not put on the stand (U.S. Government Printing Office, 277). A third Thomas assistant, Sukari Hardnett, made it clear she was not accusing Thomas of sexual harassment but said "if you were young, black, female, reasonably attractive and worked directly for Clarence Thomas, you knew full well you were being inspected and auditioned as a female. (Hardnett, 01)" Thomas mentions none of these things in his book. Instead he mentions his own testimony where he called the hearings "a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks," and goes further to say: "As a child in the Deep South, I'd grown up fearing the lynch mobs of the Ku Klux Klan; as an adult, I was starting to wonder if I'd been afraid of the wrong white people all along. My worst fears had come to pass not in Georgia but in Washington, D.C, where I was being pursued but by bigots in white robes, but by left-wing zealots draped in flowing sanctimony (Thomas,257)." Thomas dismisses the charges as being totally unfounded and all about race, in his book. Anita Hill later said that the mistake people made in looking at the hearings was that it wasn't about his race and her sex but the other way around. Hill suggests the hearings would have gone differently had she been blonde haired and blue eyed. She also said she didn't make her complaints public
until he was nominated for the Supreme Court because the sexual harassment didn't matter to her as much as it mattered "in terms of whether or not we were getting a person who should sit on the Supreme Court (Palmer, 04)." In the end, Thomas was confirmed by a 52-48 vote. Thomas's book fails to talk about his time on the Supreme Court. We know however, that he is an originalist who applies the views his grandfather taught him to the constitution. The ideas of an originalist are similar to that of a religious man. Take a very old document and go on faith that it is correct and applies to modern times. However, just like the bible, the constitution can be interpreted many ways and Thomas uses the constitution to express his own beliefs, the beliefs that Daddy taught him. Clarence Thomas is not the poor boy from Pin Point, Georgia that he wants everyone to think he was. He didn't make it to the top by sheer self reliance, but because he was given many advantages that most blacks don't have. He was given a positive role model, a safe home, and an excellent education. In his professional life, he benefited from being a black conservative in an Administration devoid of them, and yet he claims to be harmed by his race. Thomas is deceiving himself if he truly believes otherwise. Thomas' supporters suggest that he is a hero for breaking the mold of black political views. Shelby Steele writes that he is an archetype that will inspire others (Steele, 4). But will these others ever become anything without the advantages that Thomas himself had? Clarence Thomas likes to see himself as a great American story; a man who rose out of nothing sheerly through his own resolve. He forgets that he had many advantages on the way, and now he seeks to deny others those advantages.