Background

Mr. Thomas was born on June 23, 1948, in Pinpoint, Georgia, United States. He is the second child of M. C. Thomas and Leola Anderson. His father abandoned the family when he was two years old. When Thomas was six years old, his mother remarried, and he and his brother went to live with his grandfather, Myers Anderson, in nearby Savannah, Georgia. This marked a distinct improvement in their material conditions, from the dirt-poor community of Pinpoint, which lacked even sewer facilities, to the comfortable home of his grandfather, where Clarence Thomas and his brother now enjoyed regular meals and indoor plumbing. The move also placed him in the home of the man who would influence his life more than any other person. Myers Anderson made an independent living selling wood, coal, ice, and heating oil from the back of his pickup truck. He was a member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and a devout Catholic who worked hard and insisted that his grandsons do the same.

Education

Clarence Thomas and his brother attended St. Benedict the Moor, an all-black parochial school. Later he, with an eye to becoming a Catholic priest in keeping with his grandfather’s wishes, transferred to St. John Vianney Minor Seminary, a Catholic high school outside of Savannah.

After graduating from high school in 1967, Mr. Thomas briefly attended Immaculate Conception Seminary in Missouri, still planning to become a priest. But a series of racist encounters, including hearing a classmate celebrate on receiving news that Martin Luther King, Jr., had been assassinated, soon caused Thomas to leave the seminary. In 1968 he enrolled instead at the College of the Holy Cross, located in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he helped found the Black Student Union at the school and graduated cum laude in 1971 with an English major.

That fall he took advantage of an affirmative action program at Yale Law School to enroll there, although as a recipient of the law school’s affirmative-action policies, Mr. Thomas later observed that "You had to prove yourself every day because the presumption was that you were dumb and didn’t deserve to be there on merit." During law school, he tried to frustrate typical stereotypes about the subjects to which black students might expect to be drawn by focusing on business courses rather than those involving constitutional law or civil rights. He received a Juris Doctor degree in 1974.

Career

In 1974 Mr. Thomas took a job in Missouri as an assistant attorney general in the tax division, working for the state’s attorney general, John Danforth. Within a few years, Danforth had won a seat in the U.S. Senate, and he would eventually champion Thomas’s nomination to the Supreme Court. But when Mr. Danforth headed to Washington as a senator in 1977, Clarence Thomas found a job in the private sector as an in-house lawyer for Monsanto in St. Louis. He remained with Monsanto for only a short time, however.

In 1979 he followed Danforth to Washington and became a legislative aide for the Missouri senator, focusing on environmental and energy matters. By this time Thomas’s political views had assumed a solidly conservative cast that soon brought him to the attention of Ronald Reagan, elected president in 1980. Mr. Reagan appointed Thomas assistant secretary for civil rights in the Department of Education in 1981, thus planting him at the center of the subject he had studiously avoided from law school on. The following year, President Reagan made Mr. Thomas chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), the federal agency charged with enforcing civil rights laws in the workplace. In this position, he attracted the ire of traditional civil rights organizations by refocusing the agency’s anti-discrimination efforts away from its use of numerical timetables and goals to ensure minority representation in businesses and from its use of statistics to demonstrate that minorities were underrepresented in particular workplaces.

Clarence Thomas headed the EEOC for nearly eight years. During this period President George Bush nominated Thomas to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit in 1989, and he was easily confirmed by the Senate in spring 1990 to replace Judge Robert Bork, who had himself resigned from the court of appeals after being rejected by the Senate for a seat on the Supreme Court. In June 1991 Justice Thurgood Marshall retired from the Supreme Court, and President Bush was placed under intense political pressure to appoint another African American to fill Marshall’s vacant seat. Mr. Bush nominated Clarence Thomas for the position. Traditional civil rights organizations were torn by their desire to see another black fill the seat that Marshall, the Court’s first African-American, had long held on the Court and their opposition to Thomas’s conservative record on civil rights. Ultimately, organizations such as the NAACP and the People for the American Way opposed his nomination.

During initial confirmation hearings before the Democratic-controlled Senate Judiciary Committee, Clarence Thomas avoided expressing any indication of his stance on controversial constitutional issues, claiming, for example, that he could not remember having discussed with anyone the Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade (1973), which had recognized a constitutional right to abortion and had been decided while he was in law school.

Shortly before the Senate Judiciary Committee was scheduled to vote concerning Mr. Thomas’s nomination to the Court, news emerged that the FBI’s background investigation of Thomas had uncovered an allegation that Thomas had sexually harassed a female subordinate 10 years earlier when he had worked at the Department of Education. His accuser was Anita Hill, who had worked for Thomas at the Education Department and at the EEOC, and who was, at the time of his confirmation hearings, a law school professor at the University of Oklahoma School of Law. After the allegation surfaced, the Senate Judiciary Committee reconvened to hold televised hearings concerning the charge in which Hill, Thomas, and a cast of other witnesses appeared. Mr. Thomas categorically denied the charges and declared indignantly that the proceedings were a "high-tech lynching for uppity blacks." In the end, after failing to discover conclusive evidence either to confirm or to refute Anita Hill’s allegations, the Senate Judiciary Committee reported Thomas’s nomination to the full Senate without a vote. There Clarence Thomas was confirmed as an associate justice on October 15, 1991, by the 20th century’s narrowest margin, a vote of 52-48. He took his seat on the Court at the beginning of the following month.

Achievements

• Clarence Thomas is the second African American to serve on the court.

Religion

Mr. Thomas was raised Catholic.

Politics

On the Supreme Court, Justice Clarence Thomas became a regular ally of the Court’s most prominent conservative, Associate Justice Antonin Scalia. Like Scalia, Thomas was willing to reconsider a host of long-settled constitutional doctrines, such as the 20th-century Court’s willingness to permit Congress to engage in almost limitless lawmaking under the guise of its power under the Constitution to regulate interstate commerce. As one of the most reliable conservatives appointed by Republican presidents, Mr. Thomas generally followed a predictable pattern in his opinions - conservative, restrained, and suspicious of the reach of the federal government into the realm of state and local politics.

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 African Americans by the welfare state. Thomas's conservative ideas quickly brought him to the attention of the Reagan administration, which was always looking for qualified members of ethnic minorities. 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.

Clarence Thomas spoke favorably about the concept of stare decisis, or standing by precedent, during his confirmation hearings, stating that "stare decisis provides continuity to our system, it provides predictability, and in our process of case-by-case decision making, I think it is a very important and critical concept."

Mr. Thomas's belief in originalism is strong; he has said, "When faced with a clash of constitutional principle and a line of unreasoned cases wholly divorced from the text, history, and structure of our founding document, we should not hesitate to resolve the tension in favor of the Constitution's original meaning." Thomas believes that an erroneous decision can and should be overturned, no matter how old it is. Moreover, he expressed his view that federal regulation of either manufacturing or agriculture is unconstitutional; he sees both as outside the scope of the Commerce Clause. He thinks federal legislators have overextended the Commerce Clause, while some of his critics argue that Clarance Thomas's position on congressional authority would invalidate much of the contemporary work of the federal government. According to Mr. Thomas, it is not the court's job to update the constitution.

Among the nine justices, Clarence Thomas was the second most likely to uphold free speech claims (tied with David Souter), as of 2002. He has voted in favor of First Amendment claims in cases involving a wide variety of issues, including pornography, campaign contributions, political leafleting, religious speech, and commercial speech. He has made public his belief, that all limits on federal campaign contributions are unconstitutional, and should be struck down.

Mr. Thomas agreed with the judgment that the right to keep and bear arms is applicable to state and local governments, but at the same time he finds that an individual's right to bear arms is fundamental as a privilege of American citizenship under the Privileges or Immunities Clause rather than as a fundamental right under the due process clause. In cases regarding the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures, Thomas often favors police over defendants. In cases involving schools, Thomas has advocated greater respect for the doctrine of in loco parentis, which he defines as "parents delegat[ing] to teachers their authority to discipline and maintain order."

Views

Quotations: "I'd grown up fearing the lynch mobs of the Ku Klux Klan; as an adult I was starting to wonder if I'd been afraid of the wrong white people all along - where I was being pursued not by bigots in white robes, but by left-wing zealots draped in flowing sanctimony."

"Government cannot make us equal; it can only recognize, respect, and protect us as equal before the law."

"I don't believe in quotas. America was founded on a philosophy of individual rights, not group rights."

"I was smart enough to use pot without getting caught, and now I'm on the Supreme Court. If you were stupid enough to get caught, that's your problem. Your appeal is denied. This 40 year sentence just might teach you a lesson."

"Good manners will open doors that the best education cannot."

"Long gone is the time when we opposed the notion that we all looked alike and talked alike. Somehow we have come to exalt the new black stereotype above all and to demand conformity to that norm... [However], I assert my right to think for myself, to refuse to have my ideas assigned to me as though I was an intellectual slave because I'm black."

"A judge should be evaluated by whether he faithfully upholds his oath to God, not to the people, to the state or to the Constitution."

"And I don't think that government has a role in telling people how to live their lives. Maybe a minister does, maybe your belief in God does, maybe there's another set of moral codes, but I don't think government has a role."

"The only people who have quick answers don't have the responsibility of making the decisions."

"I believe that there is a moral and constitutional equivalence between laws designed to subjugate a race and those that distribute benefits on the basis of race in order to foster some current notion of equality.... In my mind, government-sponsored racial discrimination based on benign prejudice is just as noxious as discrimination inspired by malicious prejudice."

"Today, now, it is time to move forward, a time to look for what is good in others, what is good in our country. It is time to see what we have in common, what we have to share as human beings and citizens."

Personality

Throughout his life, Clarence Thomas felt discrimination on ethnic grounds. 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.

Connections

In 1971, Mr. Thomas married his college sweetheart, Kathy Grace Ambush. They had one child, Jamal Adeen. In 1981 they separated and they divorced in 1984. In 1987, Thomas married Virginia Lamp, a lobbyist and aide to Republican Congressman Dick Armey. In 1997, they took in Thomas's then six-year-old great-nephew, Mark Martin Jr., who had lived with his mother in Savannah public housing.

Father:

M. C. Thomas

Mother:

Leola Anderson

Wife:

Kathy Grace Ambush

Grandfather:

Myers Anderson

Son:

Jamal Adeen

Wife:

Virginia Lamp

great-nephew :

Mark Martin Jr.

References

• Supreme Court Appointments: Judge Bork and the Politicization of Senate Confirmations
• Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas
• Understanding Clarence Thomas: The Jurisprudence of Constitutional Restoration
• The Supreme Court Opinions of Clarence Thomas, 1991-2011, 2d ed.
• Justices, Presidents, and Senators: A History of the U.S. Supreme Court Appointments from Washington to Bush II