Clarence Thomas

 

You may have never even heard of Clarence Thomas – he is the only the second African-American to serve in the United States’ Supreme Court and possibly their most conservative member. His life has been riddled by many contradictions and has been reviled by many people for his opposition to government programmes that are intended to help minorities. If you have heard the name, then it was probably associated with a scandal that saw Thomas accused of sexual harassment of a former colleague.

 

paving the way

 

Clarence Thomas was born on 23 June 1948, in Pin Point, a small domain of around 500 inhabitants in Georgia, USA. Pin Point was named after the plantation that once stood on the land, and was given to the former slaves when it was divided up after the  American Civil War. The inhabitants of Pin Point worked hard to earn a meagre living doing manual labour on a dirty, marsh-ridden area that possessed neither roads nor sewers.

Thomas was the second child and first son of Leola Williams and M. C. Thomas. Thomas never really got to know his father, though, because he abandoned the family when Thomas was just two years old and his mother was expecting her third child. Leola managed to hold her family together by taking a job as a housemaid, aided by handouts from the local Baptist church.

When Thomas was seven he and his brother were sent to live with their grandfather, Myers Anderson, who lived in Savannah. This was the result of a stressful time for his mother, because their wooden house had burnt to the ground just before she was about to remarry. Life with his grandfather had a profound influence on the young Thomas. Not only were the standards of living far higher than he was used to, but Anderson also believed in a good education followed by hard work.

Anderson was a fervent believer of the Catholic faith, a loyal Democrat and also an active member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). It was a time when African-Americans were browbeaten, being forced to ride on the back of buses, banned from most restaurants and had little prospects of a decent job. Anderson decided if he was to get anywhere in the world and beat racism he would need to work for himself. He successfully built up a business by delivering wood, coal, ice and heating oil from the back of a pick-up truck. As a result of his flourishing business, Anderson was not only able to provide his grandsons with a comfortable home, but he also enrolled them in an all-black grammar school which was run by white nuns, St Benedict on the Moor.

Anderson was a fair and loving man, but impressed on the two boys the importance of working hard at school if they wanted to achieve a reasonable standard of living. The nuns themselves were hard taskmasters who pushed their students to achieve their greatest potentials. After school the boys weren’t allowed to go home and put their feet up. They worked for their grandfather helping him deliver fuel.

In later life Thomas often recalled his grandfather’s words of wisdom: ‘. . . school, discipline, hard work and right from wrong were of the highest priority’.

If Thomas had any spare time he liked to go to the local Carnegie library, further from home than the one in Savannah, but blacks weren’t allowed in there. After two years at the grammar school, Thomas moved to a Catholic boarding school just outside Savannah, not because he had problems but because his grandfather was pushing him towards priesthood. Thomas was the only African-American in his class at St John Vianney Minor Seminary, and for the first time felt the brunt of severe racism. He was excluded from social activities by his classmates and constantly ridiculed because of his skin colour. However, Thomas persevered and eventually graduated with admirable grades.

The next rung on the ladder towards becoming a priest was enrolment in the Immaculate Conception Seminary in Missouri. However, racism was rife and he left after only a short while, saying that he could not stay in a school that didn’t practise what it preached. The final straw came when one of the students cheered at the news of Martin Luther King Jr’s murder.

Thomas worked with his grandfather for a while and then in 1968, enrolled in Holy Cross, a Jesuit college in Worcester, Massachusetts. It was here that Thomas felt truly comfortable with his colour. Not only had the college started an ambitious black recruitment programme in the wake of King’s death, but he also helped form the Black Student Union. In the union’s second year, the members decided it would be a good idea if all the members lived together in one dormitory, but Thomas was the sole dissenter, believing that everyone should profit from associating with the white majority. After much pressure Thomas gave in but said that he wanted his white roommate from the previous year to come and live with him. During his time at Holy Cross, Thomas was an avid supporter of the Black Panther Party, which was an African-American organisation set up to promote civil rights and self-defence. Because of this support he urged a student walkout in protest against investments in South Africa.

In 1971 Thomas graduated ninth in his class and achieved an honours degree in English. The day after his graduation, Thomas married his girlfriend, Kathy Ambush, a student at a Catholic woman’s college not far from Holy Cross.

Thomas had decided that he wanted to pursue a career in law, and was accepted at Yale University Law School under its ‘affirmative action programme’, which was aimed at increasing the representation of women and minorities in areas of education from which they have previously been excluded. However, Thomas didn’t want to feel privileged because of his race, and did everything possible not to draw attention to himself. While at Yale, Kathy gave birth to his only child, a son that they named Jamal. To prove his abilities not just to himself but to his superiors as well, Thomas decided to specialise in tax and anti-trust law and when he graduated he was highly sought after by firms who suggested he should do pro bono (for the public good) work. However, Thomas took this as an insult and decided to return to Missouri, where he took a position in the offices of Attorney General John Danforth. Danforth was a young Republican and quickly became Thomas’s political mentor. As the only African-American in the office, Thomas requested that he be allowed to work on taxes cases not civil rights.

In 1977 Danforth was elected to the Senate and Thomas decided to take a job in the private sector, working in the pesticide and agricultural department of the Monsanto Company, a St. Louis business that specialised in chemicals. His job there was mainly getting pesticides through government registration. This job lasted about two years when Thomas decided to head for Washington to work for Danforth once again, but this time as his legislative aide. As before he avoided any racist issues at work, but on the other side of the coin decided to join the black conservative movement, which felt that preferential treatment towards African-Americans did more harm than good. Thomas believed that the only way that African-Americans could make their way in the world was by helping themselves.

When Thomas attended a conference of black conservatives in 1980, the Washington Post wrote an article about him which was brought to the attention of President Ronald Reagan. The president offered him a job as the assistant secretary for civil rights in his department of education. Thomas decided to accept the job and was quickly promoted to head of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). However, Thomas had a tough time in this position, which concentrated on laws against discrimination in the workplace. The Reagan administration found he was too independent-minded, but Thomas gradually bought them round to his way of thinking and made a lot of changes.

These changes in the EEOC, however, angered many of the civil rights groups, on top of this he had personal problems which made things difficult for Thomas. His grandfather died in 1983 and the following year divorced his wife, although he managed to keep custody of his son. Two years later he met the woman who was to become his second wife, Virginia Lamp, who was a senior aide to Republican Dick Armey.

 

the us courts and a scandal

 

No one was really surprised, due to his success in the government offices, when Thomas was appointed a judge on the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia in 1990. When Thurgood Marshall – the first African-American to be appointed to the Supreme Court – retired in 1991, the new president, George Bush, decided to elevate Thomas to the Supreme Court. This nomination, however, met with strong opposition from the minority groups who opposed Thomas’s conservative views on civil rights. He withstood many days of questioning from the Judiciary Committee, but they were unable to shake him on his views.

Just when his nomination looked as though it would be passed, a sensational scandal broke which looked as though it was about to ruin his career. The press had leaked information about an FBI report which had been shown to the Judiciary Committee, alleging that Thomas had sexually harassed a former employee at the EEOC, Professor Anita Hill. Hill, now a professor at the University of Oklahoma College of Law, was brought in for questioning by the Committee. Amid a flurry of controversy, the hearing was reopened and the nation was transfixed as the case was relayed via television network. Hill, who was also an African-American and a Yale Law School graduate, outlined her allegations in full detail. Thomas categorically denied the charges and said the whole ordeal was ‘a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks’.

After a long and drawn-out hearing, the Committee failed to uncover any positive proof of Hill’s allegations and in the end the Senate voted 52 against 48 to confirm Thomas’s nomination into the Supreme Court. At the age of 43, Thomas is the youngest member of the court and is known for his habit of listening rather than asking questions, something which he said he developed as a young boy.