This year, Clarence Thomas marks 25 years on the Supreme Court. In the court’s 226-year history, he is the second African-American Supreme Court justice, after Thurgood Marshall, who served from 1967 to 1991.
Clarence Thomas’s life is unusual because he is a black conservative politician. , who lost his first marriage, overcame anger and alcohol, and survived a high-tech lynching by holding on to the promises of the Bible.
He served in the Reagan administration and was nominated to the Supreme Court by President George HW Bush. Based on your own Memories, this is his story as he tells it. All quotes are from Clarence Thomas: My Grandfather’s Son: A Memoir (New York: HarperCollins, 2008).
Savannah Was Hell
He was not always a conservative. He grew up in Savannah, Georgia. “When he was a kid, Savannah was hell” (6). His parents were too poor to feed him and his brother, so they gave them to his grandparents. He called his Memories in honor of his grandfather, whom he called “dad” until the end of his life. “I had been raised by the greatest man I have ever known” (28).
But it wasn’t easy. “He never praised us, just like he never hugged us. . . . In his presence there was no play, no fun, no laughter. . . . Once, years later, I plucked up the courage to tell him that slavery was over. ‘Not in me house,’ he replied” (26). His grandfather converted to Roman Catholicism and tried to get Clarence a good Christian education.
That wasn’t easy either. “In those days it was an insult to call a dark-skinned Negro black, and more than once when our teacher was out of the room someone called me ‘ABC – America’s Blackest Child,’ an epithet that made many of my classmates class burst out laughing” (30). Outside, on the streets, things were no better. The Ku Klux Klan held a convention in Savannah when Thomas was twelve years old, and 250 of its members dressed in white paraded down the city’s main street (22).
But he went ahead and stood out in a largely white Catholic group. school. “I was never more proud than when I got my first library card” (17). “Some made fun of me for trying to ‘speak properly’ and accused me of thinking I was better than them” (36).
The Pathway to Rage
His father wanted him to become a priest and sent him to study in Kansas City at Immaculate Conception Seminary. Here the rage was born. It was a primarily white school, and when Martin Luther King was shot on April 4, 1968, he heard a student say, “That’s good.” Another replied: “I hope the son of a bitch dies” (43). Two months later, when Thomas heard that Robert Kennedy had been shot, he collapsed: “I fell to my knees and cried” (46).
This was too much. All the painful memories of her flooded her soul enraged at her, like when her grandfather
received a traffic ticket for the made-up offense of driving with too many clothes on, or when a white woman called him a “kid” in front of . All southern blacks had known those moments and felt the rage that threatened to burn away the masks of meekness and submission behind which we hid our true feelings. It was like a beast lying in wait to devour us. . . . I lost my battle with the beast in the summer of 1968. (47)
In that rage, he abandoned his quest for the priesthood and the faith of his grandparents. He went to Holy Cross College in Massachusetts and moved in a radical political direction. “It was in Boston, not Georgia, that a white man first called me black” (78). He went on to Yale Law School, graduating in 1974.
The path out of dishonest invisibility
But a sea change was about to occur in his world view. He began to feel a tension between his own honesty and his personality as an angry black man. There was a kind of awakening when he remembered the Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison. (“So, after years of trying to adopt other people’s opinions, I finally rebelled. I’m a man invisible”).
I was there. How could a black man be truly free if he felt compelled to act in a certain way, and how was that different from being forced to live in segregation? How could black people hope to solve their problems if they were unwilling to speak the truth about what they thought, no matter how unpopular it might be? He already knew that the anger we lived with made it difficult for us to think clearly. Now I realized for the first time that Was expected that we were full of rage. It was our role, but I didn’t want to play it anymore. I had already been doing it for too long and it hadn’t improved my life. He had better things to do than be angry. (63–64)
Between 1974 and 1980, when Ronald Reagan was elected president, Thomas came to see things very differently. One of the Democratic staffers told him, “Black is a state of mind.” His response, in his own mind, was, “That kind of nonsense that all of us blacks think alike was not part of my upbringing, and I saw it as nothing more than another way to herd blacks into A politic”. camp” (125).
But could he really make this change? Can a black man be conservative? “I had never met a black person who called himself a conservative, and I was surprised that we rarely disagreed on anything substantive” (124). But he took the step.
I have decided to vote for Ronald Reagan. It was a giant step for a black man, but he thought it was logical. I saw no good in an ever-growing government meddling, incompetently if not mendaciously, in the lives of its citizens, and I was particularly distressed by the Democratic Party’s incessant promise to eliminate black problems by law. (130)
Other independent minded friends
He would go on to take up positions in the Reagan administration. The price was high. “Any black man misguided enough to take a job in the Reagan Administration was automatically branded Uncle Tom” (145). “I could only choose between being an outcast and being dishonest” (133).
But as lonely as it was, he found some soul brothers. “Listen to Thomas Sowell and talk to him in private. . . It was a historic event for me.” Along with Sowell were Walter Williams and Jay Parker. Thomas said: “Intelligent, brave, independent men who come from modest backgrounds. Politics meant nothing to them. All they cared about was truthfully describing pressing social problems and finding ways to solve them” (126–127).
His closest relationship with a journalist was Juan Williams. She trusted Williams to convey his views truthfully and thus told him what he believed.
I opposed welfare because I had seen its destructive effects up close in Savannah. Most of the older people I’d grown up with, I told him, felt like I did, sharing Dad’s belief that he would be the “bane” of black people, undermining their desire to work and support themselves. I added that my own sister was a victim of the system, that it had created a sense of entitlement that had trapped her and her children. I went on to say that she was opposed to busing, preferring to give school vouchers to poor children trapped in dysfunctional schools. (132)
I think segregation is bad, I think it’s wrong, it’s immoral, I would fight it with every breath in my body, but you don’t need to sit next to a white person to learn how to read and write. I also didn’t care if certain neighborhoods were predominantly white or black, as long as they were safe and blacks could freely choose to live in either. He was sick and tired of the theories and statistics that had come to dominate discourse on both sides of the political fence. It was people and their problems that mattered to me, but most of the people I met in Washington, Republicans and Democrats alike, seemed hell-bent on winning arguments rather than solving those problems. (163–164)
Common to liberals and conservatives, Republicans and Democrats, is the tragedy of divorce. Thomas walked away from his first wife and his son.
I left my wife and son. It’s the worst thing I’ve ever done in my life, even worse than breaking my promise to Dad that he’d finish my seminary and become a priest. He had broken the most solemn vow a man can make, the one that ends. . . as long as they both live. I still live with the guilt, and always will. (135)
The Crushing Pathway Back to Christian Roots
The devastation of his marriage and continued reliance on alcohol to ease the pain sent him back to the church in search of something he had lost (136). On the road to awakening, he was nominated for the Supreme Court from his position on the District of Columbia Court of Appeals. This would be the hardest test of his life.
Anita Hill filed charges of sexual harassment. The accusations were brutal and globally public. On top of that, she called him Uncle Tom.
For daring to reject the ideological orthodoxy prescribed for blacks by white liberals, I was branded a traitor to my race. . . . If I dared step out of line, if I refused to be another invisible man, then I wasn’t Really black. I was an Uncle Tom doing Massa’s bidding. That wasn’t politics, it was hate. (184)
In the crescendo of the Senate hearings on harassment, Thomas bared his soul to the world with these words:
This is a circus. It is a national disgrace. And from my point of view, as a black American, as far as I’m concerned, it’s a high-tech lynching for conceited black people who somehow deign to think for themselves, to do for themselves, to have different ideas, and it’s a message that unless you bow to an old order, this is what will happen to you, you will be lynched, destroyed, caricatured by a US Senate committee instead of hanging from a tree. (271)
With the crushing criticism of each day, Thomas turned to God as his sustaining hope. “The only good thing about these attacks was that they encouraged me to return to the faith that had sustained me in my youth. . . . My closest friends. . . he helped guide me back to where I belonged. By running from God, I had wasted the most important part of my grandparents’ legacy” (184).
Every day I left the caucus room tired, tormented, and anxious, and every day Virginia and I bathed in God’s unwavering love. . . . I knew that no human hand could hold me in my time of trial. After years of rejecting God, I slowly entered a state of quiet ambivalence toward him, but that was no longer enough: I had to go all the way. I remembered one of Dad’s sayings: “Hard times make monkeys eat pepper…