Thomas, Clarence

June 23, 1948

Born in Pin Point, Georgia, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas was the second of three children of M. C. and Leola (Anderson) Thomas. M. C. Thomas left when his son was two, and Leola Thomas supported the family. They had little money, and after the family house burned down, Clarence Thomas went to live with grandparents in Savannah, Georgia. Thomas attended Catholic schools, whose teachers he later credited with giving him hope and self-confidence.

In 1967 Thomas entered the Immaculate Conception Seminary in Conception, Missouri, intending to become a Catholic priest. He decided to leave after hearing white classmates happily report the assassination of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Thomas transferred to Holy Cross College in Worcester, Massachusetts, on the school's first Martin Luther King Scholarship. At Holy Cross Thomas majored in English literature, graduating cum laude in 1971. An admirer of Malcolm X, Thomas helped form the Black Students League, joined the Black Panther Party, and ran a free-breakfast program for black children.

Rejected for military service on medical grounds, Thomas entered Yale University Law School in the fall of 1971 under the university's affirmative action program. He was admitted to the bar in 1974, then accepted a position as an aide to John Danforth, Missouri's attorney general. Shortly thereafter, he read the conservative African-American economist Thomas Sowell's book Race and Economics (1975), which he later claimed as his intellectual "salvation." Thomas adopted Sowell's pro-market, anti-affirmative action theories. In 1977 Thomas became a staff attorney for the Monsanto Company in St. Louis. In 1979 he joined Danforth, by that time a U.S. senator, as an energy and environmental specialist on his staff.

In 1980 Thomas spoke at the Fairmount Conference in San Francisco, a meeting of black conservatives. He denounced the social welfare system for fostering dependency. The publicity Thomas's conservative views received won him the interest of the Reagan administration. In 1981, despite his reluctance to be "typed" as a civil rights specialist, Thomas was named assistant secretary for Civil Rights in the Department of Education, where he drew criticism for refusing to push integration orders on southern colleges. In 1982 he was appointed chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Reappointed in 1986, he served until 1990. His tenure was controversial. An opponent of activist judicial action, he refused to press pending class-action suits and opposed the use of comparable-worth guidelines in gender discrimination cases. The commission allowed thousands of age-discrimination lawsuits to lapse through what he claimed was "bad management." Yet Thomas opposed efforts to secure tax-exempt status for racially discriminatory colleges, and in 1983 he secured an important affirmative action agreement with General Motors.

In 1989 President George H. W. Bush nominated Thomas for a seat on the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. The appointment was widely understood as preliminary to a possible Supreme Court appointment as a replacement for aging African-American justice Thurgood Marshall. Thomas was easily confirmed for the district court in February 1990. In July 1991 Marshall retired, and Bush nominated Thomas as his successor. Bush claimed race had nothing to do with the nomination and that Thomas was the "most qualified candidate" to succeed Marshall, an assertion widely viewed as disingenuous. Nevertheless, many blacks who opposed Thomas's conservative ideas initially felt torn by the nomination and supported him or remained neutral on racial grounds.

Thomas's confirmation hearings were acrimonious. He denounced the reasoning of the Court's Brown v. Board of Education (1954) desegregation case as "dubious social engineering." He refused to take a position on the Roe v. Wade (1973) abortion decision and aroused doubts by his assertion that he had never discussed it, even in private conversation. On September 27, 1991, the Senate Judiciary Committee deadlocked on Thomas's nomination and sent it to the Senate floor without recommendation. Shortly thereafter, testimony by Anita Hill, Thomas's former assistant who claimed he had sexually harassed her, was leaked to media sources. The committee reopened hearings to discuss the issue. The questioning of Hill and Thomas became a national television event and a source of universal debate over issues of sexual harassment and Hill's truthfulness. Despite the damaging allegations, on October 15, Thomas was confirmed by a vote of 52–48.

In his first years on the Supreme Court, Thomas voted consistently with the Court's conservative wing. His decisions narrowed the scope of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, upheld new limits on abortion rights (he pronounced himself ready to overturn Roe v. Wade ), and curbed affirmative action policies. In Hudson v. McMillian (1992), perhaps his most controversial opinion, Thomas held that the Eighth Amendment did not proscribe beating of prison inmates by guards. Thomas sometimes spoke about the treatment he had received during his confirmation process. In 1993 he gave a controversial speech linking society's treatment of conservative African-American intellectuals to lynching. During the early 1990s he regularly voted with his conservative colleagues on the Court in cases involving affirmative action, abortion, educational opportunity, the death penalty, and civil rights for gays and lesbians.

Since 1994 Thomas has increasingly become the deciding vote in numerous controversial cases, often those dealing with issues of race and free speech. He continues to make decisions that are not popular in the African-American community but that have helped him gain the respect of many people in the field. In 2003 Thomas signed a contract with book publisher HarperCollins to publish his memoirs, documenting his rise to the Supreme Court. The book is expected to be released in 2005.

See also Affirmative Action; Hill-Thomas Hearings

Bibliography

Comiskey, Michael. Seeking Justices: The Judging of Supreme Court Nominees. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004.

Court of Appeal: The Black Community Speaks Out on the Racial and Sexual Politics of Thomas v. Hill, eds. Robert Chrisman and Robert L. Allen. New York: Ballantine Books, 1992.

Foskett, Ken. Judging Thomas: The Life and Times of Clarence Thomas. New York: Morrow, 2004.

Morrison, Toni, ed. Race-ing Justice, Engendering Power. New York: Pantheon Books, 1992.

Phelps, Timothy, and Helen Winternitz. Capitol Games. New York: Hyperion, 1992.

Toobin, Jeffrey. "The Burden of Clarence Thomas." New Yorker (September 27, 1993): 38–51.

clarence e. walker (1996)
Updated by publisher 2005