Clarence Thomas

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(b. Pin Point, Georgia, 23 June 1948), associate justice, 1991–. Although he remains one of the most junior members of the U.S. Supreme Court (third last in seniority), Clarence Thomas is the most widely recognized justice on the Court and has received more attention in the popular media than virtually any other justice in American history. It is not hard to understand why. After one of the most caustic and sensational confirmation hearings in which he was accused at the eleventh hour by a former colleague in the Reagan administration of sexual harassment, Thomas emerged as the most outspoken critic of modern liberal jurisprudence ever to sit on the Court. Confirming the fears of his Democratic opponents and delighting his Republican allies, Thomas has been referred to by his supporters as the leading conservative in America. His opinions have ranged from assailing the New Deal Court, which opened the door to the federal regulatory state, to results‐oriented civil rights policy, to the Court's abortion rights decisions, to defendant‐friendly criminal law, and interpretations of the Second Amendment that have failed to recognize the right to bear arms as an individual right.

Descended from slaves of the Thomas and King plantations in Georgia, Thomas was raised by his maternal grandparents. His grandfather, Myers Anderson, was the most significant influence on his life, teaching the young Thomas the virtues of hard work, perseverance, and self‐reliance. Thomas graduated cum laude from Holy Cross and then from Yale Law School in 1974. President Ronald Reagan appointed Thomas assistant secretary for civil rights in the Department of Education in 1981. In 1982 Reagan elevated Thomas to chair the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. It was in these two capacities in the Reagan administration that Thomas established his conservative credentials, criticizing affirmative action and statistic‐based quotas, a position that put him at odds with career civil rights employees. George H. W. Bush nominated Thomas to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia in 1989. After a brief tenure on the court of appeals, President Bush nominated Thomas on 1 July 1991 to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, the first black justice on the Court. There was no little irony to Bush's appointment of Thomas as Marshall's replacement, as Thomas would be quick to criticize the civil rights orthodoxies and doctrines that were largely the legacy of Marshall's numerous opinions on the high bench. Thomas's jurisprudence involves a unique blend of natural law and natural rights philosophy with the doctrine of originalism, the theory of constitutional interpretation that seeks constitutional meaning in the intent of the framers of the Constitution.

In voting rights, affirmative action, and desegregation cases, Thomas has stressed repeatedly the importance of individual rights in the American constitutional order. His separate concurring opinion in Holder v. Hall (1994) was one of the longest concurring opinions in Supreme Court history and established Thomas as the Court's preeminent critic of group‐based civil rights policy. In Holder Thomas critically surveyed the Court's vote dilution jurisprudence under the Voting Rights Act (VRA). Vote dilution law had required jurisdictions to create “safe” minority electoral districts. The “ideal” that the Court eventually settled upon under the act became one of roughly proportional representation for legally recognized racial and ethnic groups, a policy Thomas denounced as both unprincipled and balkanizing. Thomas criticized the Court's vote dilution law for adopting an arbitrary theory of representation. The idea “that members of racial and ethnic groups must all think alike” (p. 903) had not only embroiled federal courts in “an enterprise of segregating the races into political homelands”—a practice that amounted “to nothing short of a system of ‘political apartheid’” (p. 905)—but was “repugnant to any nation that strives for the ideal of a color‐blind Constitution” (pp. 905–906), a principle Thomas asserted for the first time in Holder and that has been adopted by only one other justice on the Court, Thomas's close ally Antonin Scalia. Justice John Paul Stevens, joined by Harry A. Blackmun, David Souter, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, took the rare step of authoring a separate dissenting opinion directed solely at Thomas's interpretation of the VRA.

One year later, in Adarand Constructors, Inc. v. Pena (1995), Thomas provoked Justice Stevens, joined by Justice Ginsburg, to write another broadside directed at Thomas's remarks regarding the pernicious assumptions of affirmative action. Adarand was a groundbreaking affirmative action case involving a constitutional challenge to minority business set‐asides for federal highway projects. Thomas agreed with the majority that strict scrutiny should apply to federal as well as state affirmative action programs, a decision overruling the Court's earlier opinion in Metro Broadcasting, Inc. v. FCC (1990). In a concurring opinion, Thomas insisted that there was no “racial paternalism exception to the principle of equal protection” (p. 240). He then identified the paternalism of affirmative action with laws, such as Jim Crow, that sought to oppress blacks. As authority for the “principle of inherent equality” that he relied on in Adarand, Thomas cited the Declaration of Independence.

Thomas's focus on constitutional principle was also the basis for his critique of Brown v. Board of Education (1954), the Court's famous school desegregation case. In Missouri v. Jenkins (1995), Thomas emphasized that the Court in Brown did not need to rely on social science evidence. Basing constitutional decisions on social science evidence was dangerous business since one could find social science to support almost any conclusion. In constitutional cases the Court should rely solely upon constitutional principle. In Jenkins, Thomas also criticized the federal courts for excessive use of their powers of equity under Article III to fashion remedies for past segregation.

In a series of rulings, Thomas has also embarked on a critique of the Court's federalism jurisprudence. In United States v. Lopez (1995), he focused on its Commerce Clause cases. Lopez involved an attempt by the federal government to regulate handgun possession in a Texas public school pursuant to the 1990 Gun‐Free School Zones Act. Joining the majority's opinion denying the federal government's authority to regulate such local activities, Thomas filed a separate concurring opinion in which he criticized the Court's Commerce Clause jurisprudence dating back to the New Deal. The Court's interpretation, having “drifted far from the original understanding of the Commerce Clause” (p. 584), had allowed Congress to regulate anything that might have a “substantial effect” on interstate commerce. When “taken to its logical extreme” the substantial effects test allowed “Congress a ‘police power’ over all aspects of American life” (p. 584). This reading of the clause had rendered most of the remaining provisions of Article I, section 8 “superfluous” and came “close to turning the Tenth Amendment on its head.” In Printz v. United States (1997), Thomas reiterated these concerns, relying on Lopez to argue that the federal government's attempt under the Brady Act to regulate wholly intrastate gun sales violated the Commerce Clause as well as the Tenth Amendment. In dicta, Thomas suggested that the Second Amendment conferred a personal right to keep and bear arms and might present yet another bar to the Brady Act.

Thomas has also invited the Court to overturn its decisions applying the Eighth Amendment's cruel and unusual punishments prohibition to conduct in prisons. In Hudson v. McMillian (1992), Thomas proclaimed in dissent that “The Eighth Amendment is not, and should not be turned into, a National Code of Prison Regulation” (p. 28). Thomas's narrow, originalist construction of the Eighth Amendment has been evident in death penalty cases. Most recently, he joined Justice Scalia's dissenting opinion in Atkins v. Virginia (2002), a case that exempted individuals with mild mental retardation from the death penalty. Scalia, Thomas, and Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist voiced concern that symptoms of mental retardation could be easily feigned. In addition, the Court's reference to a “national consensus” regarding the unconstitutionality of executing those with mild mental retardation was not based on any national consensus so much as the predilections of an elite group of lawyers.

The indictment of elite opinion as the Court's guiding light in constitutional cases has been a constant theme in Justice Thomas's opinions. In Grutter v. Bollinger (2003), for instance, where the Court accepted the “diversity” rationale for the University of Michigan law school's affirmative action program, Thomas described the majority's opinion as upholding “the Law School's racial discrimination not by interpreting the people's Constitution, but by responding to a faddish slogan of the cognoscenti.” In Zelman v. Simmons‐Harris (2002), where the Court approved the state of Ohio's school voucher program for the city of Cleveland, Thomas similarly condemned “the romanticized ideal of universal public education” which “resonates with the cognoscenti who oppose vouchers” (p. 682).

In other cases Thomas has implored the Court to protect commercial speech, to allow states to impose term limits on members of Congress (which the Court has prohibited), to lower the wall between church and state in religion clause cases, and to construe the Fifth Amendment's Takings Clause more generously to safeguard property owners. Thomas's opinions in these cases have crystallized issues that have defined the modern Court. Considered a likely Republican nominee to replace Chief Justice Rehnquist upon his retirement, Thomas, the Court's youngest member, stands to exercise significantly more influence on American law than he has to date.

See also Nominations, Controversial.

Bibliography

• Ken Foskett, Judging Thomas: The Life and Times of Clarence Thomas (2004).
• Scott D. Gerber, First Principles: The Jurisprudence of Clarence Thomas (1998).
• Andrew Peyton Thomas, Clarence Thomas: A Biography (2001)

— Anthony A. Peacock

President George Bush named Clarence Thomas (born 1948) to the Supreme Court in 1991. Senate confirmation was gained only after intense public controversy over charges of "sexual harassment" brought by Anita Hill, Thomas's former employee. Since joining the Court, Thomas has tended to vote with the more conservative justices.

Clarence Thomas was born in Pin Point, Georgia, a tiny, coastal hamlet town outside of Savannah, on June 23, 1948. For the first years of his life he lived in a one-room shack with dirt floors and no plumbing. When Thomas was two years old, his father walked out on the family, leaving Clarence's mother with two small children and another on the way. At the age of seven, Thomas and his younger brother were sent to live with their grandfather, Myers Anderson, and his wife, Christine, in Savannah. Anderson, a devout Catholic and active member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), sent Thomas to a Catholic school staffed by strict but supportive nuns.

In 1964, the year the Civil Rights Act was enacted, Thomas' grandfather withdrew him from the all-black parochial high school he was attending and sent him to an all-white Catholic boarding school in Savannah, St. John Vianny Minor Seminary. Despite being confronted with racism, Thomas made excellent grades and played on the school's football team. Thomas' grandfather sent Clarence to Immaculate Conception Seminary in northwestern Missouri after his graduation from high school in 1967. Although Thomas was not the only African American student, he still was troubled by poor race relations. A racist remark made about the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., made up Thomas' mind: he would not become a priest.

Struggles with Personal Identity

The decision bitterly disappointed his grandfather, but Clarence decided to enroll at Holy Cross, a Jesuit college in Worcester, Massachusetts. Thomas was a devoted student who "was always in the library, " according to one friend. Yet the future justice found time to participate on the track team, work in the school cafeteria, and volunteer to help the poor in Worcester once a week. He also assisted in founding the Black Student Union at Holy Cross. Thomas seemed haunted by racial isolation and academic pressures and admitted later that he had seriously considered dropping out of college. However, fearful that he would be drafted for service in the Vietnam War, Thomas stayed at Holy Cross and was graduated in 1971 with honors.

Another reason that Thomas may have decided to stay in school was his introduction to Kathy Ambush, a coed at a nearby college. A few days after they met, Thomas told a friend that he was in love with Kathy. They were married in Worcester the day after Clarence's college commencement and had one son, Jamal, born in 1973.

Thanks to his sterling academic record, Thomas was admitted to the law schools at Yale, Harvard, and the University of Pennsylvania. He chose Yale because of the financial support it offered him as part of its affirmative-action policy to attract students from racial and ethnic minorities. At Yale, he continued to do well academically, receiving mostly passes on Yale's grading scale of honors, pass, low pass, and fail.

Thomas appeared to fit in socially as well as academically. Yet, years later, he described his "rage" and loneliness at feeling snubbed by whites who viewed him as an affirmative action token and ignored by African Americans with more elite backgrounds. In his third year of law school he interviewed with law firms but again felt that he was treated differently because of his race.

Joined Staff of Missouri Attorney General

Thomas graduated from Yale law school in 1974. Rather than take what he considered an insufficient salary from the firm where he'd done his summer work, Thomas accepted a position on the staff of Attorney General John Danforth, a Republican. With Danforth's election to the Senate in 1977, Thomas took a job as an attorney for the Monsanto Company in St. Louis. In 1979 Thomas moved to Washington, DC, and became a legislative assistant to Danforth on the condition that he not be assigned to civil rights issues. His resentment toward the tokenism of affirmative action, combined with his grandfather's lessons on self-sufficiency and independence, had moved Thomas into a circle of African American conservatives who rejected the dependency fostered among blacks by the welfare state.

Thomas' conservative ideas quickly brought him to the attention of the Reagan administration, which was always looking for qualified members of ethnic minorities. In 1981 Thomas was appointed assistant secretary for civil rights in the United States Department of Education. Thomas openly stated that minority groups must succeed by their own merit, and he asserted that affirmative action programs and civil rights legislation do not improve living standards.

Accepted Appointment With High Political Visibility

In 1982, Clarence Thomas became the chairman of the United States Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), which was designed to enforce anti-discrimination laws that cover race, sex, gender, and age discrimination in the workplace. Thomas served two consecutive terms as chairman, despite having previously sworn he would never work at EEOC. Over the eight years he served as chairman, Thomas shifted the focus of the commission from large class-action suits to individual cases of discrimination.

In 1990, President George Bush appointed Thomas to the Washington, DC, Circuit of the United States Court of Appeals, a common stepping stone to the Supreme Court. Thomas filled the seat left vacant by Robert Bork, an unsuccessful nominee to the Supreme Court. Thomas wrote only 20 opinions in the year he served on the court, none of which involved controversial constitutional issues. Despite this comparatively limited experience, Bush nominated Thomas to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall on July 1, 1991. In announcing his choice to replace Marshall, Bush implausibly argued that "the fact that he [Thomas] is black has nothing to do with the sense that he is the best qualified at this time."

Anita Hill Alleges Sexual Harassment

The Senate's confirmation hearing appeared to be moving along smoothly until Anita Hill's allegations were made public. On October 8, Hill - a professor at the University of Oklahoma Law School - held a press conference, in which she made public the main points of testimony she previously had given the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Vociferous protest by some feminist groups led the confirmation committee, headed by Delaware Senator Joseph Biden, a Democrat, to publicly review Hill's charges.

In her testimony, Hill alleged that - while she worked at the EEOC nearly a decade earlier - Thomas badgered her for dates and told stories in her presence about pornographic film scenes and his own sexual prowess. Hill claimed that Thomas's actions made it difficult for here to do her job and even caused physical distress. Nevertheless, she continued to initiate contacts with Thomas even after he helped arrange for her appointment as a law professor.

The televised hearings, during which Hill, Thomas, and several witnesses on both sides testified about the allegations, were among the most widely-viewed political events in television history. Thomas denied any wrongdoing. His allies suggested that Hill was lying and was being cynically manipulated by liberals opposed to Thomas's views on abortion and affirmative action. Thomas himself remarked during the course of the televised hearings that the process had been a harrowing personal ordeal for him and his wife. Indeed, he claimed, he would have preferred "an assassin's bullet to this kind of living hell, " and he would have withdrawn himself from consideration earlier had he known what lay ahead. Suspending his lifelong criticism of racial politics, he characterized the televised hearings as a "hightech lynching."

Militant women's groups threatened to vote against Thomas's backers in the next elections. At the same time, many African Americans believed the Republican charges that Hill was part of a campaign to smear Thomas. In the end, Thomas was confirmed by a 52-48 margin, the smallest - according to Time - by which any justice has been confirmed in this century.

Hill's allegations helped to make sexual harassment a major political issue. The phrase itself had varying, even conflicting, definitions. Nevertheless, local, state, and national laws were passed to stop workplace practices considered demeaning to subordinates. Meanwhile, articles and books continued to debate the validity of Hill's specific charges against Thomas. There probably never will be a consensus judgement. Hill did not overtly protest at the time the alleged actions took place, and determining the truth years later was difficult.

Thomas had separated from his wife Kathy in 1981; the two divorced in 1984, and he retained custody of Jamal. The circumstances of the divorce remain a well-guarded secret, although allegations of abuse made at the time returned to haunt Thomas during his confirmation hearings. In 1986, Thomas met Virginia Lamp, a white fellow law school graduate active in conservative causes; and the two married in 1987. She was a Labor Department lawyer when Thomas was nominated for the Supreme Court. Following the confirmation, she told her story to People, recounting the tension of the confirmation fight and speculating that Hill was in love with Thomas. She referred to the struggle to get Thomas confirmed as "Good versus Evil."

A Quiet But Effective Justice

After joining the Court, Thomas voted most frequently with Justice Antonin Scalia and Chief Justice William Rehnquist, thereby aligning himself with the conservatives who wish to restrain the federal government's power. Thomas showed no signs of the "freshman syndrome" attributed to Justice David Souter, who was relatively inactive his first year as a justice. Instead, Thomas was relatively visible in his opinion-writing from the beginning. Reviewers of his opinions and legal essays agreed that they were clear, well-researched, and consistent.

African American political groups criticized Thomas for maintaining his conservative values on the Court. In July 1995, NAACP convention delegates decried Thomas's votes regarding school desegregation, race-based redistricting of voting precincts, and racial quotas and set-asides. An invitation to speak before an eighth-grade awards ceremony in Maryland in 1996 sparked weeks of protests and disputes among school board members. The invitation ultimately was rescinded as was a request to address a youth festival in January 1997. Following the latter incident, however, NAACP president Kweisi Mfume suggested that African American organizations should stop bashing Thomas. "I don't think we can ever change Clarence Thomas, " Mfume stated, "and I don't want to spend any more of my time or NAACP time trying."

For the first few years after his appointment, Thomas tended to keep a low public profile. Due to the antipathy of some African American and feminist groups, he had fewer of the ceremonial invitations normally extended to Supreme Court Justices. From 1996 on, however, Thomas began to make occasional appearances before conservative political groups. In these speeches, he continued to call on judges to restrain their efforts to remake society by judicial decree. And, without directly alluding to his personal experiences, he eloquently deplored the decline of civility in America's public discourse and conduct.

Further Reading

A short biography of Clarence Thomas appears in the Commission on the Bicentennial of the United States Constitution's publication The Supreme Court of the United States: Its Beginning & Its Justices 1790-1991 (1992). A journalistic analysis of the Clarence Thomas/ Anita Hill controversy is Timothy Phelps and Helen Winternitz's Capitol Games (1992). An historical view is given by Illinois U.S. Senator Paul Simon in Advice & Consent: Clarence Thomas, Robert Bork and the Intriguing History of the Supreme Court's Nomination Battles (1992). A periodical with additional information is Jet (March 3, 1997).

Brock, David. The Real Anita Hill: The Untold Story. (Free Press, 1993). Danforth, John. Resurrection: The Confirmation of Clarence Thomas. (Free Press, 1994). Myer, Jane. Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas (Houghton Mifflin, 1994). Smith, Christopher. Critical Judicial Nominations & Political Change: The Impact of Clarence Thomas (Greenwood, 1993).

supreme court justice; appeals court judge; federal official

Personal Information

Born on June 23, 1948, in Pin Point, GA; son of M. C. and Leola (Anderson) Thomas; married Kathy Grace Ambush, 1971 (divorced, 1984); married Virginia Lamp, 1987; children: (first marriage) Jamal; (legal guardian of) Mark Martin Jr.
Education: Holy Cross College, Worcester, MA, 1971; Yale University Law School, JD, 1974.
Politics: Republican.
Religion: Born Baptist, raised Catholic.
Memberships: Black Student Union, Holy Cross College, founder, 1971; advisory board of the Lincoln Review.

Career

Held summer jobs in legal aid and at Hill, Jones & Farrington (law firm), c. 1971-74; offices of Missouri Attorney General John Danforth, staff member, 1974-77; Monsanto Corporation, St. Louis, MO, legal counsel, 1977-80; Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, director, 1980-89; Federal Appeals Court, judge, 1990-91; Supreme Court Justice, 1991-.

Life's Work

Clarence Thomas was sworn in as a justice of the U.S. Supreme Court in November of 1991, following perhaps the greatest furor over such an appointment in modern history. A conservative jurist with experience in the education department under President Ronald Reagan, Thomas had also headed the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission and, while there, allegedly sexually harassed a staff member, Anita Hill. Hill's accusations surfaced only after Thomas's nomination to the nation's highest court by President George Bush; Hill was by this time a law professor. The Senate confirmation hearings that dealt with these charges had enormous political and social ramifications above and beyond Thomas's suitability for the Supreme Court. The judge's appointment was a watershed for the Bush administration, which needed to replace retiring black justice Thurgood Marshall. The choice of a black conservative effectively stymied Democratic opposition to Thomas, who suspended his lifelong criticism of racial politics long enough to call his confirmation hearings a "high-tech lynching." That remark is representative of the many contradictions embodied by this controversial figure. Indeed, Newsweek noted that "Thomas is an intense opponent of affirmative action, yet has benefited from it throughout his life.... the very reason he was named to succeed Thurgood Marshall on the Supreme Court is because of his race."

Thomas was born in 1948 in Pin Point, Georgia, a tiny coastal hamlet named for the plantation that once stood there. His mother, Leola, was 18 at the time of his birth; his father M. C. Thomas left the family two years later. Leola, her two children--Clarence and his older sister Emma Mae--and her Aunt Annie Graham occupied what Newsweek described as "a one-room wooden house near the marshes. It had dirt floors and no plumbing or electricity." Their destitute life was struck by further misfortune five years after M. C. walked out on the family, ostensibly headed for Philadelphia: the house burned down, so the family moved near Leola's parents, Mr. and Mrs. Myers Anderson. Having in the meantime married a man who didn't want to raise the children--there was now a third child, Myers, who went by the name Peanut--Leola agreed to let the Andersons care for the two boys and sent Emma Mae to live with Aunt Annie in Pin Point.

Raised By His Devout Catholic Grandfather

Myers Anderson exercised a huge influence on Clarence's life. A devout Catholic who created his own fuel oil business in Savannah in the 1950s, he provided the example of self-motivation in the face of segregation that would inspire his grandson. Through hard work and a refusal to submit to the poverty and degradation of menial work, he "did for himself," as one of his favorite expressions went. He fed and cared for Clarence and Peanut and paid for their education at St. Benedict the Moor; an all-black grammar school where white nuns exercised firm discipline. The racist vigilante group known as the Ku Klux Klan often threatened the nuns, who rode on the backs of buses with their students and demanded hard work and promptly completed assignments. Clarence's grandfather took him to a meeting of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), of which Anderson was a member, and read the boy's grades aloud. "The most compassionate thing [our grandparents] did for us was to teach us to fend for ourselves and to do that in an openly hostile environment," Thomas noted in a 1987 speech before the Heritage Foundation, published in Policy Review in 1991.

Clarence performed duties as altar boy and crossing guard at St. Benedict's, and though not remembered by his teachers as an outstanding student, he excelled at sports. After school he and his brother helped their grandfather on his delivery rounds. Clarence's favorite retreat was a blacks-only library in Savannah--the Savannah public library was for whites--funded by the Carnegie family. His browsing there helped to formulate his ambition: He would one day have the sophistication to understand magazines like the New Yorker.

He graduated from St. Benedict's in 1962, spent two years at St. Pius X High School, and then transferred--at his grandfather's insistence--to a white Catholic boarding school called St. John Vianney Minor Seminary. Clarence did well in school, but experienced for the first time the hostility of racism. His schoolmates' derisive remarks came as a shock--his segregated youth had ironically provided some insulation from everyday racism--but he kept his composure. Following St. John's, Clarence went to Immaculate Conception Seminary in Conception, Missouri, to study for the priesthood. As one of only four blacks there, Thomas was again made acutely aware of the double standards of white Christian society. One incident, however, caused him to give up on the seminary for good: the voice of a fellow seminarian cheering the news that black civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., had been shot in 1968. "I knew I couldn't stay in this so-called Christian environment," he remarked later.

Struggles With Race and Identity Intensified

In 1968 Thomas began his studies at Holy Cross, a Jesuit college in Worcester, Massachusetts. This period saw an intensification of Thomas's struggle with his identity, his background, and the politics of race. He joined the Black Student Union, a militant group on campus that succeeded in using its political and rhetorical energies to make some changes, including an all-black dormitory, more courses relevant to black students, and increased financial aid. The atmosphere of questioning and empowerment was exhilarating for Thomas, though unlike many of his contemporaries he never abandoned his earliest sources of strength: "Thomas still spoke the conservative maxims of his grandfather and the nuns far more often than the chic of the left," reported Newsweek. Though he adopted some of the language, style, and arguments of the radical Black Panther Party's leaders, he remained a skeptic and was often the sole dissenter among his revolutionary circle. This tendency would serve him well as he learned what he would later call "the loneliness of the black conservative."

During his sophomore year Thomas met Kathy Grace Ambush and began a relationship that would lead to their 1971 marriage. In 1973 their son, Jamal, was born. Thomas had registered for the draft in 1966, at age 18, but had a student deferment; when he graduated in 1971, and his number in the conscription lottery was low, he seemed a likely candidate for military service in Vietnam. However, he failed his physical examination. He had applied to Yale, Harvard, and the University of Pennsylvania law schools--all of which had accepted him--and decided on Yale because of the financial support it offered him. Thomas was a beneficiary of Yale's new affirmative-action policy, which offered opportunities to minority students. Though he benefited from this policy, it raised in Thomas--perhaps for the first time--doubts about whether he had succeeded on his own merits. These doubts would trouble him throughout his career and would motivate a deep distrust of what conservatives like to call "entitlements" or "handouts."

Thus he strained to demonstrate his qualifications, to prove that something other than his blackness had brought him into the Ivy League. While at Yale he held some summer jobs; he assisted a small legal-aid establishment, which brought him into contact with welfare cases, and spent a summer at the law firm of Hill, Jones, & Farrington. In the latter job Thomas could exercise his skill at developing both sides of an argument. As a law student, Thomas dedicated himself to areas of legal study less often associated with blacks--tax and corporate law--rather than civil rights. His eagerness to dissociate himself from the stereotypes that surrounded beneficiaries of affirmative action was a strong determining factor here. Yet when he began to look for work as his graduation drew near, he found few law firms interested him. The pay they offered was demonstrably lower than what white graduates would have been offered, and they tended to assume Thomas wanted to do social rather than corporate law. Once again, he found himself pigeonholed by race.

Joined Staff of Missouri Attorney General

Rather than accept what he considered an insufficient salary from the firm where he'd done his summer work, Thomas accepted a position on the staff of John Danforth, attorney general of Missouri. Danforth had attended Yale himself and, as an Episcopal minister and Republican, he saw in Thomas a promising young conservative. Thomas worked hard under Danforth, and specialized in tax law. He achieved a victory when he appealed a decision against the state regarding the governor's banning of personalized license plates, and won in a higher court. Danforth's office had thought the case unwinnable since a lot of wealthy people had these so-called vanity plates; Thomas felt it necessary to prove that the privileged few couldn't control the law.

Yet Thomas himself sought status symbols; he bought a BMW automobile while working in Danforth's office, though he told fellow workers that a Mercedes-Benz was the car for a "gentleman" to drive. This affection for status symbols no doubt grew out of Thomas's fondness for the ideology of self-help. He took a large step in the direction of greater financial stability when Danforth left Missouri to take a Senate seat; Thomas landed a job as legal counsel for the Monsanto Corporation. There, as Time phrased it, he "shepherded pesticides through government registration."

Monsanto's chemical empire supported him comfortably until he decided to move on to Washington. He returned to Danforth's staff and worked on energy and environmental issues, but was at the same time struck by the work of a handful of black conservatives. The writings of right-wing black economists Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams, as well as the black conservative journal, the Lincoln Review, had a galvanizing effect on Thomas. He joined the advisory board of the Review, which has created waves in the black community by taking some very unpopular--some would say reactionary--stands. The journal's editor, Jay Parker, argued on behalf of the government of South Africa, while the journal itself opposed a holiday for Martin Luther King, Jr.; questioned the extent, if not the existence, of racial discrimination; and referred to abortion as a plot to "slaughter" blacks. Parker and Thomas chatted on the phone in 1980; the controversial editor would soon be looking for interested black conservatives to join the administration of President Ronald Reagan.

Accepted Posts With High Political Visibility

Thomas's first offer from Reagan's people was a position as a policy staffer on energy and environmental issues, but he turned this job down, accepting--in spite of his previous aversion to such matters--a place at the head of civil rights under the secretary of education. Ten months later he was put in charge of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), an agency charged with enforcing civil rights laws. Why Thomas accepted these jobs remains unclear, since they are the sort of classically "black" appointments he had resolutely avoided in the past. Some observers have speculated that Thomas merely took the positions with the highest political visibility, while others suggested that his recent infatuation with ultraconservative black thinkers like Sowell and Parker had awakened in him a new political enthusiasm, and that he wished to tackle affirmative action and other issues head on.

In any case, Thomas's years at EEOC were fraught with conflict. He was a demanding supervisor, and often dealt with employees harshly. He allegedly settled petty scores in harsh ways, argued inconsistently on issues like hiring quotas for minorities--he both opposed and supported them over the course of his tenure--and reportedly avoided prosecuting thousands of age discrimination cases. Although less doctrinaire than "the other Clarence"--Reagan's fiery Civil Rights Commission chair Clarence Pendleton, another conservative black who alienated much of the civil rights community--Thomas made his self-help philosophy well known. He remarked to Lena Williams in a New York Times profile that "race-conscious remedies in this society are dangerous. You can't orchestrate society along racial lines or different lines by saying there should be 10 percent blacks, 15 percent Hispanics." He also made waves by remarking in 1984 that civil rights leaders just "bitch, bitch, bitch, moan and whine."

Despite the discontent he evoked from civil rights activists, Thomas was granted a second term at EEOC in 1984. He did not stand uniformly behind the administration's decisions, however. His was a dissenting voice--though reportedly not a very loud one--when the Justice Department argued that religious institutions like Bob Jones University, which practices various kinds of discrimination, should remain tax-exempt. "A fellow member of the administration said rather glibly that, in two days, the furor over Bob Jones would end," Thomas remarked in a 1987 speech. "I responded that we had sounded our death knell with that decision. Unfortunately, I was more right than he was."

Divorced and Remarried

It was a difficult period for Thomas, who had separated from Kathy in 1981; the two divorced in 1984, and Clarence retained custody of Jamal. The circumstances of the marriage and the divorce remain a well-guarded secret, and allegations of abuse made at the time returned to haunt Thomas during his confirmation hearings years later. Thomas became a stern taskmaster at home, pressuring Jamal to succeed at school just as Myers Anderson had pressed him in his own youth. In 1986 he met Virginia Lamp, a white fellow law school graduate active in conservative causes. The two fell in love and married in 1987. Virginia was a Labor Department lawyer when Thomas was nominated for the Supreme Court.

Thomas's private regimen is as interesting a mix as his frequently contradictory public statements. He began lifting weights while at college and continues his bodybuilding to this day, yet he also smokes cigars--not, some would say, the best habit for someone in weight training. Earning $71,000 a year under Reagan, Thomas was chauffeured around in a limousine which, according to Time, stopped at a Catholic church every morning so he could pray. Yet despite his lifelong piety he was accused by Anita Hill of a fascination with pornography and bizarre sexual practices such as bestiality. He has long opposed affirmative action, but bases this distrust on a distrust of white institutions which he believes keep blacks begging for jobs and other economic opportunities.

In a critical 1987 speech before the conservative Heritage Foundation, Thomas articulated his feelings about the perils of "entitlement" programs, job quotas, and--most notoriously--welfare. He had some years earlier shocked listeners by criticizing his sister for her dependency on welfare, though, according to Time's Jack E. White "she was not getting welfare checks when he singled her out but [was] working double shifts at a nursing home for slightly more than $2 an hour." But in this Heritage Foundation speech he articulated more specifically his concern about the "welfare mentality." Though Reagan and others on the right had rankled blacks and civil rights proponents with derisive references to "welfare queens," Thomas's criticisms may have been harder for his opponents to dismiss--or so the administration hoped.

Embraced Vision of Black Conservatism

The Heritage Foundation speech also outlined Thomas's plan for bringing more blacks into the ranks of conservatism. "I am of the view that black Americans will move inexorably and naturally toward conservatism when we stop discouraging them; when they are treated as a diverse group with differing interests; and when conservatives stand up for what they believe in rather than stand against blacks," he proclaimed. He went on to suggest that the "unnecessarily negative" approach of the Reagan administration had been more alienating than its political philosophy toward welfare and affirmative action. Many critics have attacked Thomas for this ardent individualism. Bruce Shapiro represented many of Thomas's opponents when he wrote in The Nation of Thomas's "far-reaching commitment to unravel the fabric of community and social responsibility."

Perhaps the most important strand of the Heritage Foundation speech was Thomas's invocation of natural law. This discussion provided the most substantial evidence of his judicial philosophy, and was particularly worrying to civil rights advocates and many people concerned about the fundamental separation of Church and State. The alarm of these constituencies was magnified by Thomas's citing of Heritage trustee Lewis Lehrman's argument on behalf of the rights of the fetus as grounded in the Declaration of Independence as "a splendid example of applying natural law." In brief, natural law depends on applying a perception of God-given rights and rules--as, indeed, the Declaration and other founding documents of the American republic do, at least rhetorically--to human law. "Without such a notion of natural law," Thomas claimed in his speech, "the entire American political tradition, from Washington to Lincoln, from Jefferson to Martin Luther King, would be unintelligible." Thus against what he perceives as the abstractions and inhumanity of the welfare state, he promotes a philosophy that "establishes our inherent equality as a God-given right." Yet many critics have expressed grave reservations about the implications of such a belief.

The Republican party, however, which saw potential in Thomas early on, began to see him as a good prospect for the nation's highest court. President Bush nominated him to the federal appeals court in 1990, and he was confirmed by the Senate in March of that year. The appeals court is a common stop on the route to the Supreme Court, and this was a route in which Thomas had expressed no uncertain interest. Bush nominated him in 1991. Still, his performance on the appeals court wasn't exactly impressive. "As Supreme Court nominees go," reported Margaret Carlson in a 1991 Time profile, "Thomas has little judicial experience. He is not a brilliant legal scholar, a weighty thinker, or even the author of numerous opinions." Bruce Shapiro was more blunt in the Nation, calling the judge "among the more scantily qualified Supreme Court candidates in recent memory."

Supreme Court Nomination Created Controversy

The stage was set for an ideological battle over Thomas's appointment even before Anita Hill went public with her accusations. The NAACP, after lengthy discussion and much internal upheaval, voted to oppose Thomas's confirmation. The chairman of the organization, William F. Gibson, read a statement featuring a seven-point argument for opposing Thomas. This statement, which was printed in its entirety in Crisis, reasoned that "Judge Clarence Thomas's judicial philosophy is simply inconsistent with the historical positions taken by the NAACP." The criticisms centered on Thomas's performance at the EEOC and what Gibson characterized as the judge's "reactionary philosophical approach to a number of critical issues, not the least of which is affirmative action." Oddly enough, the NAACP stressed the importance of looking past race in this instance--though it believes fervently in the importance of having African Americans on the Supreme Court--to focus on Thomas's record. Thus an organization traditionally affiliated with the "entitlement" sensibility Thomas so disliked had actually judged him on his merits. It found him wanting. Similarly, the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) voted 20-1 to oppose Thomas's confirmation. The lone dissenter was also the CBC's only Republican.

Jesse Jackson, perhaps the most vocal black activist in the United States, was particularly critical of Thomas. In These Times quoted Jackson's remarks to a Chicago meeting of his organization, Operation PUSH: "He is a prime beneficiary of our [civil rights activists'] work. He got public accommodations, the right to vote, open housing because of civil rights marches and activism; yet he stood on our shoulders and kicked us in the head." John B. Judis, writing for In These Times, asserted that Thomas's praise for Lehrman's antiabortion article "puts him on the fanatic fringes of the abortion debate and could prove politically embarrassing to Republicans in 1992." Judis remarked on Thomas's celebration of former National Security Aide Oliver North--who had lied to Congress about his involvement in the famed Iran/Contra scandal--and concluded a lengthy examination of Thomas's legal thinking by declaring simply "that Clarence Thomas is not fit to be a Supreme Court justice."

George Bush expressed his support for Thomas largely on the basis of the judge's character. His life story, a real-world example of the conservative ideal, appeared in virtually every endorsement. Bush made no mention of Thomas's judicial temperament, nor of his decisions on the appeals court; it was clear that this appointment was a symbolic one. Strangely enough, Thomas's patron had chosen him because he was a successful black man. Whether Thomas privately considered himself a beneficiary of a White House "quota" remains unknown. In any case, Thomas's personal odyssey from Pin Point to the pinnacle of Washington, D.C., success, or some version of that odyssey, would always serve as an endorsement. Lena Williams's New York Times article concluded by referring to Thomas's "difficult childhood and his ability to succeed against the odds," an angle that the Bush administration would exploit to the utmost in its presentation of Thomas the judicial candidate.

Allegations of Sexual Harassment Surfaced

The Senate's confirmation hearings appeared to be moving along smoothly when Anita Hill's allegations were made public. On October 8, Hill--a professor at the University of Oklahoma Law School--held a press conference, in which she made public the main points of the testimony she had previously given the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The FBI report had been reviewed by the confirmation committee but not made public, and on the day of Hill's press conference the Thomas vote was scheduled to move to the Senate floor. A wave of protest by women's groups and other activists led the committee, headed by Delaware's Joseph Biden, a Democrat, to review Hill's charges. Her testimony accused Thomas of badgering her for dates while she worked at the EEOC, and of accosting her with stories of pornographic film scenes and his own sexual prowess. The accusations fit the paradigm of sexual harassment in the workplace: the male superior uses sexual banter and other discomfiting tactics as a means of exercising power over a female underling. Hill claimed that Thomas's constant harassment made it difficult for her to do her job, and even caused her anxiety to manifest itself in the form of physical distress.

The televised hearings, during which Hill, Thomas, and several witnesses on both sides testified about the allegations, were among the most widely-viewed political events in television history. Thomas denied any wrongdoing, but stopped short of calling Hill a liar. Most of Thomas's political allies on the committee--Republican senators Strom Thurmond, Arlen Specter, Alan Simpson, and Orrin Hatch--interrogated Hill mercilessly, and suggested that Hill was either being cynically manipulated by liberals or was lying outright. Spy magazine reported that numerous young researchers had been recruited by the White House staff to find embarassing or otherwise damaging disclosures about Hill and her testimony. The partisan battle over the confirmation became so vicious that following the vote, considerable press attention was devoted to the Congress's political game-playing and the painful divisions it left among various constituencies.

Thomas himself remarked during the course of the televised hearings that the process had been a harrowing personal ordeal for him and his wife. Indeed, he claimed, he would have preferred "an assassin's bullet to this kind of living hell," and he would have withdrawn from consideration earlier had he known what lay ahead. Lewis Lapham's column in Harper's the following month attacked Thomas as a hypocrite: "He had the gall to present himself as a victim, a man who had been forced to endure the unspeakable agony of sitting comfortably in a chair for two weeks and being asked a series of facile questions to which he gave equally facile answers." Lapham asserted that Thomas displayed "contempt for the entire apparatus of the American idea--for Congress, for the press, for freedom of expression, for the uses of democratic government, for any rules other than his own."

Confirmation Followed Heated Hearings

Many blacks had supported Thomas and followed the Republicans' theory that Hill was part of a campaign to smear him. Many women who opposed Thomas and believed Hill vowed to defeat Thomas's backers in the next elections. Another ramification of the Hill-Thomas debacle was the major attention suddenly afforded the previously neglected question of sexual harrassment; the phrase entered the mainstream political vocabulary almost overnight. In any event, the verdict--in the minds of the committee and in the press--was that both witnesses were credible and that determining the truth of what had taken place nearly a decade before was well nigh impossible. The president urged Congress to give Thomas the benefit of the doubt, arguing that he was innocent until proven guilty. Others argued that Thomas was not on trial for harassing Hill, and that any doubt was sufficient to disqualify him. In the end, Thomas was confirmed by a 52-48 margin. To those who complained about the confirmation hearings' focus on these "personal" matters, the New Republic replied that "The Bush administration promoted Mr. Thomas's nomination as a matter of character, not of professional qualifications; and it has reaped a bitter reward."

Following the confirmation, Virginia Thomas told her story to People, recounting the tension of the confirmation fight and speculating that Anita Hill was in love with Clarence Thomas. She referred to the struggle to get Thomas confirmed as "Good versus Evil." Alisa Solomon, meanwhile, writing in the Village Voice, argued that Anita Hill was attacked for showing the same qualities for which Clarence Thomas was celebrated: her ability to argue, her aggressiveness, and her self-sufficiency. Thomas, Solomon wrote, "seems unable to see women as a class, and therefore unable to recognize the importance of rulings that affect us."

Clarence Thomas had made it to the top, and his defiant individual style and renegade opinions had left him with many admirers and many detractors. The question on most observers' minds was this: Would Thomas be the gadfly on a conservative court, or would he fall in line with its prevailing right-leaning tendencies? His experience prior to his confirmation guaranteed that he would be watched just as closely after he donned the robes.

Judicial Decision Brought Criticism

During the first few years after his appointment to the Supreme Court, Thomas remained quiet and out of the limelight that had shone on him for most of his career. He did not ask questions during oral arguments, he wrote few decisions or dissension to these decisions, and most often followed the lead of other conservative justices such as O'Conner and Scalia. Then, starting in 1994, Thomas came into his own as a justice as he became the deciding vote in numerous controversial cases, many dealing with issues of race and free speech. One specific case that many minorities took to heart was Adarand Constructors Inc. vs. Pena where a white owner of a construction company sued the state of Colorado for unfair hiring practices due to affirmative action. Randy Pech, the plaintiff in the case, argued that the state had awarded an Hispanic-owned company the job of redoing highways based purely on the fact that the company was Hispanic-owned and run. Pech contended that he was the victim of reverse-racism and that this was not the purpose of the affirmative action program. The issue was contested heavily both within the court as well as in the media, where many people felt that if Pech won his case that it would be the beginning of the deconstruction of the affirmative action program that greatly helped many minorities secure jobs and education. When the final decision came down, in favor of Pech by one vote, 5-4, it was discovered that Thomas had voted in favor of the majority.

Another example of Thomas's controversial decision making came from the case Missouri vs. Jenkins. In this case, the state of Missouri was suing a district judge for forcing them to "waste" money in order to bring more white students into predominately black city schools that were receiving fewer funds from their community than suburban schools that were mainly made up of white students. Once again the case was heavily disputed in the court and once again the decision came out in favor of the plaintiff, with the court split 5-4. Many critics of the decision felt that this was a major blow to the idea that desegregation, whether natural or forced, would bring equality to educational institutions, but Thomas shot back with his own views, which were summed up later in Insight on the News magazine: "He added that a school's majority black status is not a constitutional violation in and of itself and wondered why there was an assumption that 'anything that is predominantly black must be inferior.'"

Both of these decisions outraged many in the African-American community, who felt that Thomas had turned into an "Uncle Tom," completely controlled by the conservative right who traditionally downplayed the needs of minorities. Yet Thomas felt that it was his job not to play favorites to any one community, but instead to show impartiality in his decisions and to try and follow the letter of the law. As he told Jet magazine, "I cannot do to White people what an elite group of Whites did to Black people, because if I do, I am just as bad as they are. I can't break from ... law just because they did. If they were wrong in doing that (using law to discriminate) to us, then I am wrong in doing it to them."

Gained Respect Along With Criticism

Since 1994 Thomas has continued to make decisions that were not popular in the African-American community. However, as he remained constant in his decisions, he also gained the respect of many people in the field who assumed the worst of him after the Anita Hill hearings. Ronald Rotunda, a professor at the University of Illinois said to the Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service, "He thinks independently and it's unfair to think of him as a knee-jerk conservative." Many people still feel however that Thomas has somehow "betrayed" the needs of minorities, specifically those of the African-American community. Yet as Thomas told Newsweek, "It pains me more deeply than any of you can imagine, to be perceived by so many members of my race as doing them harm ... All the sacrifices and all the long hours of preparation were to help not to hurt."

One area that Thomas receives little criticism in is his family life. Although married for the second time, it is clear that Thomas is devoted to his wife and to fostering a healthy relationship. Even more evident is Thomas's love for his extended family. In 1997 he took custody of his grandnephew, Mark Martin, Jr., in order to give him the opportunity to succeed, something he would not have received with his parents. The American Lawyer, explained the circumstances: "Mark Sr., Thomas's nephew, had been in prison on cocaine-trafficking charges. And Mark Jr.'s mother Susan was struggling with her own problems, raising four children, including young Mark Jr., on her own. Thomas believed that the boy would face lifelong trouble if he were not removed from his environment soon, and the parents agreed." According to a friend in the same American Laywer article, "He was paying back his own grandfather by taking care of Mark."

An Ebony magazine article said that "Thomas's struggle against the tradition of Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall and his exile from mainstream Black America is one of the strangest stories of our time." Yet many critics wondered if the controversy around his decisions would fade as time went by and he remained a steady advocate for more conservative justice. Yet as recently as 2002, institutions in the African-American community have publicly questioned his methods and protested his appointment to the highest court in the nation. Five professors at the University of North Carolina School of Law at Chapel Hill boycotted a visit that was to be given by Thomas to allow students to discuss and interact with the justice. According to the protestors, in the New Jersey Law Journal the reason for the protest was that "For many people who hold legitimate expectations for racial equality and social justice, Justice Thomas personifies the cruel irony of the fireboat burning and sinking ... his visit adds insult to injury." Thomas, however, takes comments such as these in stride, for as he told Newsweek he has the "right to think for myself." He went on to say that he refused "to have my ideas assigned to me as though I was an intellectual slave because I'm black." In 2003, M2 Best Books reported that Harper Collins made a deal with Thomas to publish a book that would "trace his life from his upbringing through his confirmation to the court," in order for people to better understand why he chooses the way that he does.

Further Reading

• American Lawyer, August 2001, p. 76.
• American Spectator, October 1991.
• Crisis, August/September 1991.
• Harper's, December 1991.
• In These Times, July 24, 1991; August 7, 1991; October 23, 1991.
• Insight on the News, September 4, 1995, pp. 8-10.
• Jet, November 28, 1994, p. 22; September 11, 1995, p. 8.
• Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service, July 2, 1995.
• M2 Best Books, January 10, 2003.
• Nation, September 23, 1991; October 14, 1991; October 28, 1991; November 4, 1991; November 11, 1991.
• New Jersey Law Journal March 18, 2002, pp. 6-7.
• New Republic, October 28, 1991.
• Newsweek, September 16, 1991; October 21, 1991; October 28, 1991; August 10, 1998, p. 53.
• New York Times, February 8, 1987; October 8, 1991.
• People, October 28, 1991; November 11, 1991.
• Policy Review, Fall 1991.
• Spy, December 1991.
• Time, September 16, 1991; October 28, 1991.
• U.S. News & World Report, October 21, 1991.
• Village Voice, October 22, 1991.

— Simon Glickman and Ralph G. Zerbonia

• Born: June 23, 1948, Savannah, Ga.
• Education: Holy Cross College, B.A., 1970; Yale Law School, LL.B., 1973
• Previous government service: assistant to the Missouri attorney general, 1973–77; legislative assistant to U.S. Senator John Danforth, 1979–81; assistant secretary of education, Civil Rights Division, 1981–82; chairman, Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, 1982–90; judge, U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, 1990–91
• Appointed by President George Bush July 1, 1991; replaced Thurgood Marshall, who retired
• Supreme Court term: confirmed by the Senate Oct. 15, 1991, by a vote of 52–48

Clarence Thomas became, at the age of 43, the second black associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. He replaced Thurgood Marshall, the first African American on the Court. Thomas's road to the pinnacle of judicial power, however, was filled with obstacles.

Clarence Thomas rose to prominence from humble origins. He was raised by his grandfather, Myers Anderson, after his father abandoned him. Although poor, Anderson was a proud man with high hopes for his grandson. He pushed Thomas to excel in school and provided discipline and stability for his grandson. Thomas responded with high achievement in school that led him eventually to graduate from Yale Law School in 1973.

Thomas's first job as a lawyer was in Missouri, where he worked for the attorney general, John Danforth. Later, Danforth was elected to the U.S. Senate as a Republican, and Thomas went to Washington as the Senator's legislative assistant. During the 1980s, Thomas, with support from Senator Danforth, achieved top-level jobs in the U.S. Department of Education and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

In 1990, President George Bush appointed Thomas to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Eighteen months later, Thurgood Marshall resigned from the Supreme Court at the age of 82. On July 1, 1991, President Bush nominated Thomas to replace Justice Marshall. The President said: “If credit accrues to him for coming up through a tough life as a minority in this country, so much the better. It proves he can do it, get the job done. And so that does nothing but enhance the Court, in my view.”

Standing next to the President, Clarence Thomas replied: “In my view, only in America could this have been possible…. As a child I could not dare dream that I would ever see the Supreme Court, not to mention be nominated to it.”

The move from nomination to Senate confirmation was difficult for Thomas and the President. After several days of hearings, the Senate Judiciary Committee was sharply divided along partisan lines in its evaluation of Thomas. The Democrats, with one exception, clearly opposed his nomination, and the Republican members of the committee favored it. The committee vote was deadlocked, seven members for Thomas and seven against him.

Suddenly, the confirmation process became embroiled in controversy. Anita Hill, a former employee of Thomas at the U.S. Department of Education and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, charged him with sexual harassment. The Senate Judiciary Committee conducted special sessions to examine these charges by Hill. After three days of intense and acrimonious discussion of this issue, the Senate Judiciary Committee concluded its work and sent Thomas's nomination to the Senate for a final decision. The Senate committee vote remained at seven for Thomas and seven against him.

The Senate voted to confirm Justice Thomas by a vote of 52 to 48. This was the closest vote of approval for a Supreme Court appointment in more than 100 years. Eleven Democrats joined 41 Republicans to vote for Justice Thomas.

Justice Thomas has performed carefully and competently. At first, he usually joined with Justice Antonin Scalia when presenting concurring or dissenting opinions. Since 1994, however, Thomas has often acted independently to challenge conventional legal positions. For example, he wrote the Court's opinion in Wilson v. Arkansas (1995), which revived the old English common law “knock and announce” rule to augment the 4th Amendment's protection against unwarranted or unreasonable searches and seizures. This common law rule requires law-enforcement officers to announce their presence before entering a home or place of business.

Sources

• Jane Flax, The American Dream in Black & White: The Clarence Thomas Hearings (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998). Scott Douglas Gerber, First Principles: The Jurisprudence of Clarence Thomas (New York: New York University Press, 1999)

Thomas, Clarence, 1948-, associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court (1991-), b. Pin Point (Savannah), Ga. Raised in a poor family, he graduated (1974) from the Yale Law School and became a prominent black conservative active in Republican causes. He chaired the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (1982-90) during the Reagan and Bush administrations, and attempted there to modify the application of federal affirmative action guidelines. In 1990 he was appointed a judge on the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. In July, 1991, President George H. W. Bush nominated Thomas to the Supreme Court, to replace Thurgood Marshall. In Oct., 1991, when approval was all but assured, the Senate Judiciary Committee reopened confirmation hearings to examine charges by Anita Hill, a Univ. of Oklahoma law professor, that Thomas had subjected her to sexual harassment while she was an EEOC employee in the 1980s. Testimony and debate on the charges, followed by a nationwide television audience and revealing deep divisions among the public, did not in the end change the committee's recommendation for approval, and Thomas was confirmed by a full Senate vote of 52 to 48. Taking his seat, he aligned himself with Antonin Scalia, forming the Court's most conservative grouping.

Bibliography

See his memoir (2007).

Associate Justice Clarence Thomas survived tense, nationally televised Senate confirmation hearings in 1991 to become the second African American in U.S. history to reach the High Court.

Thomas was born June 23, 1948, in Pin Point, Georgia, a small town near Savannah. He attended Savannah's Saint Benedict the Moor, Saint Pius X High School, and Saint John Vianney Minor Seminary. When he graduated from Saint John in 1967, he was the only African American in his class. After just one year as a seminarian at Missouri's Immaculate Conception Seminary, Thomas abandoned his plans to become a priest. Instead, he enrolled in Massachusetts's Holy Cross College. After graduating in 1971, he attended Connecticut's Yale University Law School, and earned a doctor of jurisprudence degree in 1974.

Thomas married Kathy Grace Ambush in 1971. The couple had a son, Jamal Thomas, in 1973, and divorced in 1984. In 1986, he married Virginia Lamp, a political activist and a lawyer for the U.S. Department of Labor.

Thomas's first job out of law school was as assistant to Missouri's Republican attorney general John C. Danforth. Thomas specialized in tax and environmental issues. In 1977 he accepted a position in the law department of Monsanto Chemical Corporation. Thomas returned to public service in 1979, when Danforth was elected to the U.S. Senate. Danforth invited Thomas to work for him as a legislative aide in Washington, D.C.

Thomas's star rose quickly during the Republican administration of President Ronald Reagan. In 1981 he was appointed assistant secretary in the civil rights division of the U.S. Department of Education. It was here that his path crossed that of Anita Hill, a recent Yale University Law School graduate. In 1982, when Thomas became chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), Hill also moved to the federal agency.

In 1990 Thomas became a federal judge for the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. In 1991 President George Bush nominated Thomas to the U.S. Supreme Court. During the confirmation process, Hill accused Thomas of sexually harassing her while she worked for him at the EEOC. After tense hearings before the U.S. Senate, Thomas was confirmed by a vote of 52-48. On October 18, 1991, he was sworn in as the 106th justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Thomas is known as a conservative justice, voting to uphold states' rights and limit the powers of the federal government. He frequently votes with Justice Antonin Scalia and Chief Justice William Rehnquist.

CROSS-REFERENCES: Hill, Anita Faye.

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