Anita Faye Hill is a U. S. attorney and academic.
Background
Hill was born on July 30, 1956 in Lone Tree, Oklahoma, the youngest of the 13 children of Albert and Erma Hill, who were farmers. Her family came from Arkansas, where her great-grandparents and her maternal grandfather, Henry Eliot, were born into slavery.
Education
After graduating as valedictorian from Morris High School, Oklahoma, she enrolled at Oklahoma State University, receiving a bachelor's degree with honors in psychology in 1977. She went on to Yale Law School, obtaining her Juris Doctor degree with honors in 1980.
Career
After graduation, she took a full-time job as a professional lawyer with the Washington law firm of Ward, Harkrader, and Ross.
In 1981, after working with the firm for about a year, Hill accepted a job as the personal assistant to Clarence Thomas, who was then head of the Office of Civil Rights at the Education Department in Washington. It was at this time, according to her sworn testimony, that he made repeated advances toward her and, when she rebuffed him, began to make vulgar remarks to her and to describe in vivid detail various hard-core pornographic films he had seen. When he began dating someone else, Hill stated, the harassment stopped, and she accepted an offer to follow him to a better job when he was made chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The alleged harassment began again, however, according to Hill's version of the events. In 1983, after being hospitalized with stress-related stomach problems, she left Washington to accept a position as a professor in the area of civil rights at Oral Roberts University in Tulsa.
In 1986, the university was reorganized, and the law school moved to the state of Virginia. Because she preferred to be near her family in Oklahoma, Hill declined to move with the school and instead sought employment at the University of Oklahoma, where she became a specialist in contract law. Six years of teaching are usually required before tenured status is granted to a professor there, but Hill was tenured after only four years. In addition to her teaching duties, she served on the faculty senate and was also named the faculty administrative fellow in the Office of the Provost, which made her a key voice in all major academic policy decisions.
Such was the state of Hill's life on September 3, 1991, when she was approached by the Senate Judiciary Committee and asked to supply background information on Clarence Thomas, who was then being considered as a replacement for Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. Hill, who had never filed a complaint against Thomas, found herself reluctant to go public with her story some ten years after the fact.
Initially, she decided to protect herself and her privacy by remaining silent. On further reflection, however, she apparently felt an obligation to tell the truth as she knew it, no matter how difficult that might be.
By September 9, Hill had decided to cooperate in the investigation of Thomas on the condition that her identity be kept confidential. But she was informed on September 20 that the Judiciary Committee could not be told her story unless Thomas was notified of her identity and given a chance to respond to her allegations. Furthermore, if she agreed to cooperate, she and Thomas would both be questioned by the FBI. Hill pondered these new facts as the confirmation hearings for Thomas, already underway, drew near their close. On September 23, she agreed to allow her name to be used in an FBI investigation. She also requested permission to submit a personal statement to the committee.
Hill has since criticized the handling of her complaint, in part because copies of the FBI report were given to just two committee members, and her personal statement also failed to reach all those who should have seen it. Thomas, meanwhile, had issued a sworn statement forcefully denying all of Hill's allegations against him. In his version of the events, he had simply asked Hill out for dates a few times. He and his supporters characterized her eleventh-hour appearance as a ploy designed to keep him off the bench, engineered by liberals opposed to his appointment to the court.
After considerable debate, the U. S. Senate decided that new hearings on Thomas's confirmation would be held and that Hill would be called to Washington to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee—which was made up of 14 white, male legislators. The televised hearings, which included Hill's and Thomas's appearances, drew an audience of millions, who were riveted by the drama of race and sex unfolding on the screen. Hill remained dignified and composed throughout the proceedings—in the face of repetitive questioning by the senators. Her credibility and character were vehemently attacked by some observers, who questioned why she maintained a speaking relationship with Thomas after the alleged incidents occurred and why she never filed a formal complaint. Republican legislator Arlen Specter went so far as to imply that Hill had fantasized the whole scenario; others suggested that she was acting out of jealousy because Thomas had failed to provide her the attentions she secretly desired from him.
Racial issues were in evidence during the hearings and influenced reaction among both the general public and the Judiciary Committee. Thomas himself fueled that fire when he denounced the proceedings as a "high-tech lynching, " effectively accusing Hill of participating in a racist plot to keep him out of the Supreme Court because he is black.
The nomination of Clarence Thomas was confirmed on October 16, 1991. Hill, who had by then returned to Oklahoma, accepted the news with the composure that had marked her appearance before the committee.
Many of Hill's detractors had predicted that she would capitalize on her experience by making high-paid speaking appearances, writing a book, or even selling her story as a television movie-of-the-week, but in the months following her testimony, she proved them wrong. She resumed her usual teaching duties and returned to her regular routine as nearly as was possible, given the reporters and others who constantly sought her out. In time she took a sabbatical from teaching, using the interlude to study the sociology and psychology of sexual harassment. Aside from an appearance on the CBS News program 60 Minutes, and, much later, one on the Today show, she turned down all interview requests. She made carefully selected appearances on the speaking circuit, often for no fee, and at such appearances, she declined to talk in detail about the hearings or her own personal experience, focusing instead on the larger issues of sexual harassment and discrimination in general.
Following the hearings, former Minnesota House representative Gloria M. Segal approached Hill with a plan to establish an endowed fund for a special professorship in her name—devoted to the study of sexual harassment and workplace equity—at the University of Oklahoma. In spite of the fact that half of the $250, 000 needed for the project was easily raised, by mid-1993 work on establishing the professorship had stalled, due mainly to the adverse publicity and political fallout felt at the University of Oklahoma.
In the fall of 1995, Hill retuned to her teaching position at the University of Oklahoma. During her leave, she authored two books. In 1995, she co-edited the book Race, Gender, and Power in America: the legacy of the Hill-Thomas hearing with Emma Coleman Jordan. Hill left the University of Oklahoma at the end of the fall 1996 semester.
Hill accepted a position as a visiting scholar at the Institute for the Study of Social Change at University of California, Berkeley in January, 1997, but soon joined the faculty of Brandeis University—first at the Women's Studies Program, later moving to the Heller School for Social Policy and Management. In 2011, she also took a counsel position with the Civil Rights & Employment Practice group of the plaintiffs' law firm Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll.
Over the years, Hill has provided commentary on gender and race issues on national television programs, including 60 Minutes, Face the Nation and Meet the Press. She has been a speaker on the topic of commercial law as well as race and women's rights. She is also the author of articles that have been published in The New York Times and Newsweek and has contributed to many scholarly and legal publications in the areas of international commercial law, bankruptcy, and civil rights.
In 1997 Hill published her autobiography, Speaking Truth to Power, in which she chronicled her role in the Clarence Thomas confirmation controversy and wrote that creating a better society had been a motivating force in her life. She contributed the piece "The Nature of the Beast: Sexual Harassment" to the 2003 anthology Sisterhood Is Forever: The Women's Anthology for a New Millennium, edited by Robin Morgan. In 2011 Hill published her second book, Reimagining Equality: Stories of Gender, Race, and Finding Home, which focuses on the sub-prime lending crisis that resulted in the foreclosure of many homes owned by African-Americans. She calls for a new understanding about the importance of a home and its place in the American Dream. On March 26, 2015, the Brandeis Board of Trustees unanimously voted to recognize Hill with a promotion to Private University Professor of Social Policy, Law, and Women's Studies.
Religion
Hill was raised in the Baptist faith.
Views
Quotations:
As a faculty member of this conservative religious school, Hill took an oath that said in part: "I will not lie, I will not steal, I will not curse, I will not be a talebearer. "
“Women who accuse men, particularly powerful men, of harassment are often confronted with the reality of the men’s sense that they are more important than women, as a group. ”
“Most of us have everything we need to get through a crisis; we just have to tap into it. ”
“Role models matter. ”
“I no doubt have benefited from affirmative action programs, which looked at my race, gender, and background and determined whether I would be admitted. But I am not ashamed of this fact, nor do I apologize for it. Such programs provided me with the opportunity to prove myself, no more, no less. After admission, my success or failure would be determined by my efforts. I do not consider myself either more or less worthy than my colleagues in the same programs. ”
“The real problem is that the way that power is given out in our society pits us against each other. ”
Membership
In 2005, Hill was selected as a Fletcher Foundation Fellow.
On January 7, 2017, Hill was inducted as an honorary member of Zeta Phi Beta sorority at their National Executive Board Meeting in Dallas, Texas.