9
Recognize the Power of Symbols
Most of the work of a judge sitting on the US Supreme Court is conducted in writing. So shouldn’t lists of the favorite texts read by the judges be particularly revealing? For example, it turns out that Justice Stephen Breyer points to a worthy list of classics from Proust to Montesquieu as his inspirations, while Anthony Kennedy loves Shakespeare, Solzhenitsyn, and Trollope. Well, okay, such classic selections sound impressive but are a little too orthodox to really tell us much.
At least Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg takes a small step toward reading-as-we-know-it because her favorite author is Vladimir Nabokov, the professor of literature who rocked the literary world with his acclaimed but controversial novel Lolita. Dealing with dangerous themes of a girl’s emerging sexuality, the book was described as “shocking” in the original 1958 Time review, which also endorsed it as “a major work.” Ginsburg says Nabokov changed the very way she looked at the written word. However, even more revealing is the choice of the Supreme Court’s sole black member, and only the second ever to serve on the court, the so-called silent judge, Clarence Thomas, because the book that inspired him is The Autobiography of Malcolm X.
When you think about it, Malcolm X is far from being suitable reading for a judge, considering that Malcolm X was, above all, an outlaw. But don’t get me wrong. I don’t mean by this someone who breaks the law, although in his youth he certainly did do that too, but rather to say that Malcolm X was someone who wanted to create an alternative society under different rules. His very name is a rejection of the social order, a denial of his family and social roots, which he describes as irretrievably contaminated by “white rapists” and centuries of injustice. He says he came to hate his lighter skin as revealing “the white rapists’ blood in me” and adopted the X to symbolize the true African identity stolen from him long ago. This Malcolm X is no kind of civil rights leader but, on the contrary, condemns notions of such rights and the law itself as chains continuing the oppression of “negroes,” or “the original men” as he calls them, and reinforces centuries of servitude.
THE MAN WHO DIDN’T WRITE
MALCOLM X’S AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Alex Haley (whose real name is actually Will Palmer) came from a very different background to Malcolm X—his father was even an Ivy League graduate. As a child, Haley loved stories, especially adventures and moral tales from the Bible. His grandparents’ house, where he lived as a young child, “was the only one in Henning with a library, and it was well stocked. A black traveling bookseller would come around, especially in the fall, when people had money from the cotton harvest,” notes Robert Norell in his biography of Haley, adding that books usually cost one dollar, except if they were Bibles, which were more expensive.
One evening, during the Great Depression, when Haley was living with his parents, a white man knocked at his parents’ door and asked his mother if she had any work for him. This was doubly unusual, as in those days the shadow of Confederate massacres, lynchings, and official disenfranchisement were the backdrop for most black families. At this time, however, his parents had no income and were themselves being paid with food vouchers. “No,” she answered, but she could give him a plate of food. Sometime later, as Norell recounts, the Haleys were driving through Oklahoma on their way to Tennessee when his mother, Bertha, became very sick. In desperation, his father knocked on the door of a strange house in the dark and asked for shelter. The owner of the house was none other than the man who years before had eaten with them. For Haley, the coincidence not only recalled the Bible stories he had read so avidly as a child but made them real.
Underneath the hate-filled radicalism (for which he is still condemned by many) there’s another Malcolm X—a young man who aspires one day to be a lawyer. His teachers had told him “with a kind of half-smile” that becoming a lawyer wasn’t a “realistic goal for a nigger”—just before advising him to consider instead something “practical” like carpentry. Now, carpentry was Jesus’s humble profession, of course, but the idea was clearly received very badly by Malcolm.
But then the Christian—the “White Man’s religion”—virtue of humility was never a trait in abundance with Malcolm X, even if he was obliged to feign something like it in jobs ranging from being a shoeshine boy to fourth cook (or glorified dishwasher, as he called it) on a train. Later, as a waiter, he began to exaggerate a humble attitude, including plenty of what he calls the “Uncle Tom-ing,” to get better tips, having observed that white people would pay liberally for the impression that they were considered important. Such “Uncle Tom-ing” was an early use as well as recognition of the power of symbols, as was the decision to put a significant proportion of his earnings into buying a smart bright green suit. He made this investment, he writes, because “in order to get something, you had to look as if you already had something.”
So the suit was an effort to stand out in the anonymous, mostly desperately poor, black underclass he was surrounded by, but it was also an effort to elevate himself a little bit above them. Just as when, in due course, he did become a respected figure, a community leader for at least part of the community, in the form of a minister in a church, it was as one unambiguously preaching from on high to the unenlightened.
Politics and religion have always mixed freely in Harlem, uptown Manhattan, and the combination can sometimes be pretty toxic. In the course of writing this book, I visited Malcolm X Boulevard, a key thoroughfare there named in Malcolm’s honor, and couldn’t avoid seeing a thirty-foot-high illuminated sign for the ATLAH World Missionary Church that uncompromisingly advises passersby (in block capitals):
HAD YOU FOLLOWED ME INSTEAD OF OBAMA
YOU WOULD BE MILLION DOLLAR HOME
OWNERS. OBAMA TURNED YOU
HOMO AND HOMELESS.
It’s not a very progressive message and all the more aggressive when you recall that President Obama, the United States’ first African American president, was supported by the great majority of black voters—a pretty comprehensive 96 percent. Perhaps the Reverend James David Manning was aiming his message at nonvoters, otherwise it would have seemed likely to fall upon deaf ears.
On the reverse side of its illuminated sign, the Church of ATLAH continues:
WHITE LGBTQ MISFITS TELL NEGROS ATLAH
IS A HATE CHURCH. BOOTLICKING COONS
HELPING WHITE MAN TEAR
DOWN A BROTHER.
ALL ATLAH MEN ARE HOMEOWNERS, BUSINESS OWNERS,
LEADERS IN THEIR HOMES. LEADERS IN THE CHURCH,
AND LEADERS IN THE COMMUNITY.
A local resident, Jackie, told me that everyone considered the pastor to be a bit mad but added that he also did a lot of good work within the community. Such are the contradictions of Harlem.
Malcolm X was accused, on the face of it quite fairly, of preaching hate. Indeed, in later years, he himself pretty much disowned his early views and teachings. Yet that is to read his words perhaps too literally. Within the Harlem community, congregations seem quite relaxed about what, in other contexts and other communities, would seem to be nothing less than hate speech. The rhetoric is one thing; the actions are another. It’s a pragmatic approach to life sometimes lost on those from outside the community.
Anyway, as minister of Temple No. 7 in Harlem, the largest and most prestigious temple (after the Chicago headquarters) in the American church called the Nation of Islam,1 he taught that the United States represented not so much “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” as “slavery, suffering, and death.” These uncompromising words, he recalls, were painted on a board in Temple No. 1. On the other side of the board were the three qualities of the new church: freedom, justice, and equality.
And yet, at the same time (as the book makes subtly clear) Malcolm X retained something of a philosopher’s mindset. If in public he was rarely prepared to allow any divergence of view, in private he acknowledged gaps in his theories and uncertainty as to their foundations.
THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MALCOM X
AUTHOR: ALEX HALEY
PUBLISHED: 1965
The central thread running through his autobiography, combining theory and countertheory, thesis and antithesis, is that of identity or, perhaps we should say, social status. Malcolm X’s account starts with intimate examples of the various pecking orders in the mean, poor, and crime-ridden streets of Harlem, what he calls “the ghetto,” before it expands into a full-blown theory of racial prejudice and a shocking narrative of how inferiority was forced onto the “original people” by the treacherous and evil white man.
Malcolm X was fascinated by the ghetto. For him it was a place with two aspects: daytime squalor and “nighttime opulence in its back alleys and on its avenues” as another biographer, E. Victor Wolfenstein, has put it. It was a place of contrasts and contradictions, which only reflected the wider realities of the world. Haley’s book charts Malcolm X’s remarkable passage from the ghetto to the international stage and his personal journey from an angry preacher of racially framed simplicities to a more reflective statesman, but the journey in all the crucial personal and psychological aspects could have taken place simply on the streets of Harlem.
The book has been hugely popular, selling over a million copies in its first two years. Over the years notable readers have included Spike Lee, film director, producer, writer, and actor; James Baldwin, novelist, playwright, and activist; and Oprah Winfrey.
During the course of the biography, reflecting the development of his ideas over the years of his life, Malcolm begins to acknowledge that this figure of the enemy white man is something of a mythical construct and that the truth is more complex. Nonetheless, Malcolm X uses the evil white man as a symbol to argue against integration. Separating out “original man,” the African negroes, he set the scene for a battle not merely for recognition but for supremacy in a eugenic hierarchy. Written in the early 1960s, The Autobiography of Malcolm X addressed a society in upheaval, so much so that merely listening to Malcolm X was a political, even radical, statement. Indeed, it still is, and doubly so for a black Supreme Court justice.
But perhaps Atallah Shabazz, Malcolm X’s son (Shabazz, supposedly the name of a long-ago but great African leader, is one of the names that Malcolm adopted in preference to his birth name of Little), puts his finger on what connects the Supreme Court justice and radical church preacher best with a comparison to another famous personal history: The Diary of Anne Frank. Shabazz explains that his father shared a belief with the young Jewish girl hiding from the Nazis in a Dutch attic. They believed “in the power of words to influence and transform lives.” This is a principle that Clarence Thomas also holds closely in his work in the grand, marbled halls of the US Supreme Court.
Likewise, at the heart of Malcolm X’s book is the conviction that in order to understand the power of words, they need to be reinterpreted as operating on many levels, one of which is as a more fundamental kind of communication that uses the power of symbols.
Indeed, The Autobiography of Malcolm X is packed with symbolism. Starting in chapter 1, the welfare visits his mother received from city officials brought vital resources and advice but also a second and less welcome message: that the family was dependent and inferior. Malcolm X recalls that the welfare staff who visited the family “acted as if they owned us, as if we were their private property.”
Similarly, when, as a teenager, he artificially straightened his natural hair, his “conk,” to look more like the white man, he says his hairstyle was intended to raise him above the other black youths, to be a kind of rite of passage to the adult world, but was in reality marking his “first really big step towards self-degradation.”
And then there was the status symbol of a good-looking white girlfriend. At the time, Malcolm X was incredibly proud to go out with one of the best-looking white girls in black downtown Roxbury, saying even that it seemed he had really begun to “mature into some real status,” but later on he despised and regretted his own hypocrisy and insincerity.
Not to forget, of course, status also came from carrying guns. “Red,” as he now called himself, soon packed a gun. “I saw how when the eyes stared at the big, black hole, the faces fell slack and mouths sagged open.” Malcolm X even took to carrying three guns at once, in various holsters. Sure enough, he ends up in prison, but if that is where many people end their stories, it was really where Malcolm X’s truly began. Norfolk Prison Colony had a remarkable feature: it contained a very substantial library, donated by “a millionaire named Parkhurst” who’d collected hundreds of old and rare books, many of which were on history and religion.2
Malcolm X quickly overcame illiteracy, spending days looking up words in an illustrated dictionary. The word “aardvark’” particularly stuck in his mind: “a long-tailed, long-eared burrowing African mammal” that eats insects.
“I suppose it was inevitable that as my word-base broadened, I could for the first time pick up a book and read and now begin to understand what the book was saying. Anyone who has read a great deal can imagine the new world that opened.”
For Malcolm X, the books made the prison bars melt away.
The first books he read, and the ones that impressed him most, were collections of scientific and historical facts, particularly one called Wonders of the World, along with Will and Ariel Durant’s The Story of Civilization and H. G. Wells’s Outline of History. An introduction into a lost inheritance of black culture came from W. E. B. Du Bois’s Souls of Black Folk and Carter G. Woodson’s Negro History. He also read the novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a best-selling tale of a long-suffering black slave who is resold and sent off on a Mississippi riverboat. In fact, it seems this is almost the only novel that he did read.
Malcolm X read avidly about Gandhi’s campaign to push the British out of India, about the history of China and the opium wars, and about the signs put up by the “vicious, arrogant white man: ‘Chinese and dogs not allowed.’” These books provided him with “indisputable proof that the collective white man had acted like a devil in virtually every contact he had with the world’s collective non-white man.” At this stage in his life, he did not appreciate that the vicious treatment of the nonwhite man was also a feature of relationships within the white races, riven by innumerable other divides, be they religious, social, or ethnic, his failure particularly highlighted by casual and cold remarks about Hitler’s treatment of the European Jews.
In these history books, Malcolm X looked for—and found—stories and parallels that enabled him to make sense not only of the world but also of himself. This is why The Story of Civilization made such a profound impression.
“Civilization is a stream with banks,” Will Durant once said. “The stream is sometimes filled with blood from people killing, stealing, shouting and doing the things historians usually record, while on the banks, unnoticed, people build homes, make love, raise children, sing songs, write poetry and even whittle statues. The story of civilization is the story of what happened on the banks. Historians are pessimists because they ignore the banks for the river.”
The Durants’ approach was looked down on by conventional historians, who particularly accused them of seeking to personify processes and events, a charge to which they admitted. “We believe that in the last hundred years history has been too depersonalized,” Will Durant once said, “and that statistics have replaced men in the story of mankind. History operates in events but through persons; these are the voice of events, the flesh and blood upon which events fall, and the human responses and feelings are also history.”
And the Durants worked hard on their project. The research for each of the series of books was time-consuming and required from the mid-1930s on that the Durants follow a strictly observed regimen of work and study. They studied seven days a week, from eight in the morning to ten at night, reading and carefully noting information from about five hundred books for each of their own volumes.
The economic freedom to devote years of work like this was provided by the success of Will Durant’s first book, The Story of Philosophy, a brisk account of the ideas of the world’s greatest thinkers, from Plato to John Dewey. First published in 1926, The Story of Philosophy has sold three million copies. (Even many decades later, when I look at Amazon to see how my own humble introduction to philosophy, 101 Philosophy Problems, is doing, I find that, as Amazon likes to put it, my customers have “also bought” Will Durant’s venerable book.) The Story of Philosophy was aimed at the general reader and sprinkled with anecdotes and personal comments in a manner that made it far more readable than the standard philosophy book. And it was very much the template for the later Story of Civilization.
Will and Ariel Durant put it like this: “To those of us who study history not merely as a warning reminder of man’s follies and crimes but also as a remembrance of generative souls, the past ceases to be a depressing chamber of horrors; it becomes a celestial city, a spacious country of the mind, wherein a thousand saints, statesmen, inventors, scientists, poets, artists, musicians, philosophers and lovers still live and speak, teach and crave and sing.”
THE STORY OF CIVILIZATION
AUTHORS: WILL AND ARIEL DURANT
WRITTEN BETWEEN 1927 AND 1975
Malcolm X is not the first and won’t be the last person to be enticed into the world of reading not by fiction but by facts and factoids. Indeed, it is a cliché of everyday life that encyclopedia salesmen used to visit suburban homes offering their wares to families who may well have had few other books. No one could read the twenty-three volumes of the Britannica, even if many explorations might start there. However, The Story of Civilization is a little bit more than a mere compilation of facts. It is, as the title claims, very much a story, and a grand one at that. The writing alone took up most of Will Durant’s life (he started in 1927 and completed it, with the help of his wife, Ariel, in 1975), by which time it spanned more than five million words and eleven volumes.
Durant himself was led to his task by a book, An Introduction to the History of Civilization, which had been started but never completed by the nineteenth-century British historian Henry Thomas Buckle. Durant threw aside the British nationalism and determined instead, as he said in the preface to the book, “to tell as much as I can, in as little space as I can, of the contribution that genius and labor have made to the cultural heritage of mankind. . . . It may be of some use,” he went on, “to those upon whom the passion for philosophy has laid the compulsion to try to see things whole, to pursue perspective, unity and understanding through history in time.” The aim, he said, was “to portray in each period the total complex of a nation’s culture, institutions, adventures and ways.” The first volume, Our Oriental Heritage, traced the beginnings of civilization to the East, while the tenth volume, Rousseau and Revolution, found in the French philosopher’s notion of universal rights a kind of logical closure even as the Durants allowed that chronologically there were two more centuries to document.
Rousseau and Revolution won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction in 1968 and like all the other ten volumes was a best seller. The series managed total sales of more than two million copies in nine languages, a readership, as the New York Times noted in its obituary for Will Durant, enjoyed by few historians. The Times went on to suggest that one explanation for the success of The Story of Civilization was “the clarity and wit of its prose” (something no one has ever said of the Britannica), while another key ingredient was its emphasis on man’s achievements in art, literature, science, and philosophy “rather than on the follies and crimes of mankind or on military, political and economic events.” Or ideas, not statistics, we might say.
One way or another, the result was that, while in prison, Malcolm X explored philosophy. In his autobiography, he recalls, rather randomly, the German philosophers “Schopenhauer, Kant and Nietzsche” but quickly dismisses them, saying that they spent their time arguing over useless things and probably laid the ground for the rise of Hitler too. Spinoza impressed him, though, all the more because Spinoza was black—a black Jew, actually. Ultimately, Malcolm X says the whole of Western philosophy “wound up in a cul-de-sac” determined to hide the black man’s greatness. He says that of Western and Eastern philosophies, he came to prefer the latter, seeing Western philosophy as essentially unacknowledged borrowings from the East. Even “Socrates, for instance, traveled to Egypt,” he notes, ironically missing that any such visit would have been at the time that Egypt was conquered by the Greeks and becoming part of the classical (Hellenic) empire—and thus a poor example of non-Western influence.
He clearly found a chord with philosophy’s great iconoclast Friedrich Nietzsche. In his sermons, directly following Nietzsche, Malcolm X denounces Christianity as a religion fit only for slaves, a slave ideology. Islam, instead, for Malcolm X, was a liberation theology.
Indisputably, reading in prison changed forever the course of his life. It awoke in him a craving to be mentally alive no less. He told one correspondent that his alma mater was books. “If I weren’t here, every day, battling the white man, I could spend the rest of my life reading, just satisfying my curiosity, because you can hardly mention anything that I’m not curious about.”
Alex Haley, the indispensable interviewer and editor behind the Autobiography, notes in a personal epilogue that closes it that any interesting book Malcolm X read could get him going about his love for reading books. “People don’t realize how a man’s whole life can be changed by one book,” Malcolm X told Haley and returned again and again to the books he had first come across while in prison.
And yet, even if Malcolm X loved reading books, he was not really made of the stuff of a true author. Rather Malcolm X was a speaker, a fount of fiery words, who thundered out sermons and relished the cut and thrust of debate. His nature is revealed in his second life as an Islamic preacher. He notes that when he spoke at rallies he would draw “ten or twelve times as many people as most other so-called Negro leaders” and claims that the ghetto masses had “chosen him as their leader.” Add to which, as Alex Haley notes, he was “clearly irked” by the newspapers reporting a poll that found that it was Martin Luther King, and not himself, who was “doing the best work for New York negroes.”
Fard’s Nation of Islam gave Malcolm X a platform that he used to develop and publicize a radical politics built on a theory of racial identity—and conflict. Yet Islam also later brought him to a very different view, one in which racial divisions began to melt away. This later vision came at a time when he was already in the process of falling out with Fard.
The turning point came on a pilgrimage to Mecca, when he was astonished that all the pilgrims were dressed the same. “You could be a king or a peasant and no one would know.” But more importantly, he began to see that the color of people’s skin was not important either. “Packed in the plane were white, black, brown, red and yellow people, blue eyes and blond hair, and my kinky red hair,—all together, brothers! All honoring the same God, Allah.”
Now, for the first time in his life, Malcolm says, he considered it possible that a white man could be good to him without any hidden, selfish motive. “Always in my life, if it was a white man, I could see a selfish motive,” he recalls with honest if appalling ungraciousness.
Asked what his feelings were after his pilgrimage, he tells reporters that what he has been struck by most is the brotherhood, “the people of all races and colors from all over the world coming together AS ONE!” Most significantly of all, he now says that he sees the earth’s “most explosive and pernicious evil” as racism.
This reformed Malcolm X even says that Islam erases distinctions of race, but this is an optimistic assertion, clearly not borne out by actual societies, such as Saudi Arabia itself, where a small elite defined by race oppresses and exploits a foreign “worker” population. On his return to the United States, he tries to stress in all his public pronouncements that he is not condemning white people as such but rather white racists. In other respects, though, his position remains radical: he wants the negro to fight not for a place in the existing system but to overturn the system itself. Likewise, toward the end of the book, Malcolm talks of the origins of the United States in the genocide of indigenous American Indians, condemning the United States as the only nation that tried, “as a matter of national policy, to wipe out its indigenous population.” More shameful still, he writes, even today “our literature, our films, our drama, our folklore all exalt it.” He adds, “Our children are still taught to respect the violence which reduced a red-skinned people of an earlier culture into a few fragmented groups herded into impoverished reservations.”
Here is a Malcolm X who has progressed far beyond simplistic notions of race toward ideas of indivisible human rights and universal values—the kind of values that the US Supreme Court, in fact, is tasked to uphold. Perhaps that is why, at the end of the biography and the close of one of history’s most extraordinary personal journeys, Malcolm X talks of his days as a fiery Muslim preacher in New York as “a bad scene” and regrets the “sickness and madness of those days” before noting, rather plaintively, “I do believe I might have made a good lawyer.”
Actually, I’m not so sure of that, but what is clear is that, a decade later, his story helped transform the frustration and anger at what seemed to be all-pervading racism of American life of another young, black, and struggling American, Clarence Thomas, into a more focused bid to become a kind of alternative Malcolm X, one who really did become a lawyer.
In his own autobiography, Thomas, like Malcolm X, starts by crisply mentioning shocking, jarring childhood experiences, invariably rooted in racial prejudice, that seem to have regularly marked his journey. My Grandfather’s Son is in many ways a compelling read all on its own, detailing Thomas’s extraordinary rise from poverty in rural Georgia in the bitterly divided American South to his bitterly fought promotion to the nation’s highest court. Throughout, as with Malcolm X, the shadow of racial prejudice is always present. Thomas’s career, life, and family’s well-being were continually threatened by vicious accusations that fed off a seam of racism lurking just beneath the surface of the nation.
Yet the references to personal struggles are made tersely, even brusquely, and without elaboration or further comment. Because, with Judge Thomas, not only is there a line between fact and comment, but the latter is generally not wanted.
As Jan Crawford Greenburg, a journalist for ABC News who interviewed him at length, says, ever since Clarence Thomas joined the Supreme Court in 1991, he has largely remained silent, and his silence has become part of his mythology. “He rarely speaks from the bench. He hasn’t responded to legions of critics. His judicial opinions reveal a powerful voice, but his story had been written by others.” However, there she is not quite right. Because there is his autobiography.
MY GRANDFATHER’S SON: A MEMOIR
AUTHOR: CLARENCE THOMAS
PUBLISHED: 2007
It is surely notable that Clarence Thomas says that the pages of Malcolm X’s autobiography became grubby and worn because he studied them so closely. But one other effect seems to have been on how the future Supreme Court judge later approached his own autobiography. Malcolm X starts with a plainly delivered account of his early childhood brought abruptly to an end by his father’s suicide and his mother’s subsequent institutionalization, while Thomas’s story starts with a plainly delivered account of his early childhood in the Deep South ended by his mother’s decision to send him and his brother to be raised by his grandparents as she felt unable to care for them. Indeed, the two men seem to have shared many key experiences and anxieties in their formative years.
But where Malcolm X eventually found himself as a fiery orator, Clarence Thomas always seems to have been something of an egghead, dedicated to nothing so much as getting the best grades. Indeed, the superficial heart of his autobiography is rather a self-serving tale of academic excellence, and you have to look behind that to find a more compelling, personal narrative that includes emotional distress over divorcing his first wife, his awkward embrace of conservative politics (seen as “anti-black”), and above all the drama of the confirmation hearings for his appointment to the Supreme Court.
It is this ostensibly very civilized process that is titled “Invitation to a Lynching.” Here in this very public drama, Thomas’s bitterness at the roles forced on African Americans in a white man’s world is laid bare. Mind you, Thomas himself received rather better treatment in that world than many others, with a $1.5 million advance for his book and a wide readership, which saw the book hit number one on the New York Times nonfiction best-seller list.
In his book, Thomas combines a lawyer’s grasp of detail with a deft storyteller’s instinct. “Nothing about my childhood seemed unusual to me at the time,” he explains early on before continuing matter-of-factly that he was born in 1948 in Pinpoint, a coastal community in southern Georgia. His father abandoned the family three years later, but even so Thomas has fond memories of his earliest years, which he calls idyllic.
“Sometimes I heard the grown-ups talk about the white people for whom they worked, but I took it for granted that they were all rich. Photographs in newspapers and magazines gave me fleeting glimpses of an unreal existence far from home, but Pinpoint (a saltwater creek not far from the town of Savannah) was my world and until I started going to school, the only sign that there might be another one was the occasional airship or blimp I saw flying overhead.”
In fact, books were one of the few things that traveled between the two worlds. And books are central to Clarence Thomas’s story: he notes that Savannah would be known to most people through reading Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, a nonfiction work later made into a film that presents the town as an “architectural wonderland full of well-heeled eccentrics.” Yet, he says, if such a world ever existed, it was certainly not the deprived and ramshackle Savannah he knew.
He lived with his mother and siblings in the “ramshackle house” of an aunt and uncle, until the house burned down when he was seven. After this, his mother moved Thomas and his younger brother to a flat in a house in Savannah that lacked indoor plumbing or beds for the children. Thomas slept in a chair. “Overnight I moved from the comparative safety and cleanliness of rural poverty to the foulest of urban squalor,” Thomas wrote, recalling a time of “hunger without the prospect of eating, cold without the prospect of warmth.”
And then, one Saturday, Thomas wrote, his mother told Thomas and his younger brother Myers that they were going to live with their grandparents: Myers and Tina Andersen. The boys were sent out the front door with all their belongings hastily stuffed in a pair of grocery bags.
The Andersens were comparatively well off, but to say that his grandfather was stern would be an epic understatement. “The damn vacation is over,” his new “father,” or “daddy” as Clarence Thomas always refers to him, said as the two boys arrived, before setting out the rules of his new home, the most important of which was that his grandparents were always right. On one occasion Thomas answered back to his grandfather and was immediately slapped round the face—so hard it knocked him to the floor. And yet if “Daddy” was strict and unbending, the home was comfortable (and of course well regulated), and Thomas soon accepted the new routine.
Thomas went to all-black church schools through the tenth grade, although even then he was conscious of distinctions based on class and skin color. He was enrolled at Florence Street—“one of the finest public schools in Savannah built specifically for black students.” Throughout the book, perhaps paradoxically, Thomas defends segregation, not obviously as an end in itself but as an acceptable feature of a world in which so many other factors divide. He insists, for example, that what black children need is good schools, not necessarily to be bused into white neighborhoods to sit alongside white children in rundown city schools.
Even in his segregated black school, he recalls being insulted by black classmates “because of the darkness of my skin” and says he was referred to as “ABC,” code for “America’s Blackest Child.” Whites lived in a parallel world: his only real encounter with them was as nuns and priests.
“We didn’t consider them white. They were nuns. You had white priests and white nuns, but they were considered nuns and priests,” Thomas says. “That’s sort of like thinking of angels. You didn’t think of angels as white or black. They were angels.”
Their example inspired Thomas, as did (more subtly) the fact that among his classmates were the children of professionals: teachers, doctors, and businesspeople. “The sisters taught us that God made all men equal, that blacks were inherently equal to whites, and that segregation was morally wrong.” If, today, schools run by nuns seem to many secular educationalists as anachronistic, at the time they offered a crucial alternative to the state system.
Before long, Thomas decided he wanted to become a priest too. A Catholic boarding school prepared boys for the seminary, so at age sixteen Thomas “dared to leave the comfort zone of segregation,” he wrote, and transferred there, enrolling in tenth grade and becoming one of the school’s first black students.
Thomas recalls his feelings of panic and anxiety—the price his generation paid for moving out from behind the wall of segregation. He survived the many blows to his self-esteem, but his grades were excellent and he made swift progress as a diligent student. He was already determined to succeed, not only for himself but also for his race. When he returned home on weekends, Thomas says his proud grandfather would take him to the local NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) meetings so he could report on his grades. He became one of the school’s top students and was applauded at his grandfather’s meetings. He realized that he himself had become a symbol—a symbol of hope and pride for them.
At the same time, however, he relates how he had become increasingly disillusioned with the Catholic Church’s acceptance of the treatment of blacks in the United States, saying that its silence began to haunt him. To use the language of the church, he lost his vocation, a fact brought home to him one day when he walked into his school dormitory and heard someone shout that Martin Luther King Jr. had been shot, followed by the crude response of one of his fellow students: “That’s good, I hope the son of a bitch dies.” Thomas explains, “His brutal words finished off my vocation and my youthful innocence about race.”
Thomas had begun to mature in his views, and in particular he began to see the church as an institution complicit in the racism of the era. “When I went to church back in the ’60s, there was no focus on ending segregation, except from the nuns, who were adamant from day one,” Thomas told a television interviewer later. “The Church wasn’t. It seemed to be more accommodating, again, at least from where I stood. And I just thought that had they been as principled as the nuns or as forceful as they are on the issue of abortion now, I would have gone on and become a priest.”
This was part of a political awakening that The Autobiography of Malcolm X in particular was instrumental in guiding and forming. At Holy Cross, Thomas says he read the book so many times that the pages grew worn. He particularly admired the black activist’s philosophy of self-reliance and, having also grown up in the segregated South, shared Malcolm X’s distrust of government and white society. Yet, even as a young student with the words of Malcolm X in his ears, he developed and valued important friendships with whites.
Years later, in the early 1990s, when President George Bush was looking for a replacement for Thurgood Marshall, the Supreme Court’s first African American justice, the Republican Party focused more on Clarence Thomas’s conservative views. Had the White House vetted Thomas more thoroughly, let alone analyzed those views, it might well have been reluctant to nominate him. So convinced were they that here was a mere follower, they scarcely noticed that he’d given countless speeches while at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission expressing a range of controversial opinions, not only about the law and the Constitution but also of his admiration of Louis Farrakhan and the black Muslim theory of self-reliance. However, both of these topics would come up at his confirmation hearing.
Clarence Thomas writes bitterly that at these hearings, the necessary public prelude to becoming a Supreme Court judge, he had to be “dehumanized and destroyed,” precisely because he held views considered heretical for a black man and partly because, as he puts it, he was in a different ideological neighborhood and refused to buy in to the views that whites had “disseminated as the prevailing view for blacks.”
He says his critics—the people who questioned whether he was smart or qualified enough to be on the court or those who suggested that he would meekly do whatever a white Supreme Court colleague told him—are in their own way as bigoted as the whites of his childhood in the deep South.
“People get bent out of shape about the fact that when I was a kid, you could not drink out of certain water fountains. Well, the water was the same. My grandfather always said that, ‘The water’s exactly the same.’ But those same people are extremely comfortable saying I can’t drink from this fountain of knowledge . . . They certainly don’t see themselves as being like the bigots in the South. Well, I’ve lived both experiences. And I really don’t see that they’re any different from them.”
At overwhelmingly all-white Holy Cross, he had been an outspoken activist who openly admired Malcolm X. This was the time when the American South was increasingly torn by urban race riots and political protests. For Thomas himself, the reality of “racism had become the answer to all my questions, the trump card that won every argument.” He had become “an angry black man.”
He argued then and still believes that white people have created a system where blacks have to stay in a certain place—only this time the boundaries concern ideas, not geography. As for the voices of white liberal reformers, he became, and still is, very skeptical, saying, “These people who claim to be progressive . . . have been far more vicious to me than any southerner and it is purely ideological.”
Once again it was books that came to his rescue. While at Holy Cross College, he was able to enroll in an individual studies class and “felt the thrill of true intellectual growth.” He read voraciously, including Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, two works of quasi-philosophical style that I personally detest but seem to have inspired many individualist endeavors. Their main thrust is that there is virtue in the pursuit of individual achievements, coupled with a disdain for consideration of social values. Thomas says he took what he wanted from it and disagreed with the rest. “It went without saying that I was an individual: we are all individuals. The question was how much courage I could muster up to express my individuality.”
And whether from Rand or just from first principles, the idea that government tends to “meddle with incompetence if not mendacity” in the lives of its citizens is central to Thomas’s future politics.
JUDGE THOMAS’S FAVORITE READS
In his autobiography, Clarence Thomas says that his love of Churchill “kindled a love of reading for its own sake”—one that he had not acquired in college.
“Before long I was gobbling up such fat tomes as Paul Johnston’s Modern Times and A History of Christianity, after which I branched out to Lincoln biographies.” For “lighter fare” he read the Westerns of Louis L’Amour and Ayn Rand’s political novels, “whose scathing criticisms of the dangers of centralized government impressed me even more after working in Washington.”
“Reading Richard Wright’s Native Son had made the strongest impression on me as a college student. What had happened to Bigger Thomas, I knew, could happen to any black man, including me.”
In the darkest moments of his own real-life “inquisition” by the Senate panel supposedly reviewing his suitability to become a Supreme Court justice (but, he says, actually pursuing a more narrowly party political agenda), Thomas also recalls another famous story of injustice meted out to black men: To Kill a Mockingbird, in which Atticus Finch, a small-town southern lawyer, must defend Tom Robinson, a black man accused of raping a white woman. “He was lucky to have a trial at all—Atticus had already helped him to escape a lynch mob’s rope.”
Thomas says another of his favorite books is Battle Cry of Freedom by James McPherson, a history of the American Civil War, and at one point in his memoir, he urges one young man he meets to “keep on reading and dreaming.”
But speaking of individuality, here, once again, books came to Thomas’s aid. He took an independent study course on black novelists that included Richard Wright’s Native Son. The novel describes the nightmare world of an innocent black man who finds himself caught up in a chain of events that eventually leads him to commit an act of violence that ultimately results in his death. Thomas also read Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, which contains what seems to be Thomas’s favorite quote, reproduced at length in his autobiography:
I was never more hated than when I tried to be honest. Or when, even as just now, I’ve tried to articulate exactly what I felt to be the truth . . . I was pulled this way and that for longer than I can remember. And my problem was that I always tried to go in everyone’s way but my own. I have also been called one thing and then another while no one really wished to hear what I called myself. So after years of trying to adopt the opinion of others I finally rebelled. I am an invisible man.
Particularly striking is the line, “I have also been called one thing and then another while no one really wished to hear what I called myself.” This seems to truly crystallize Clarence Thomas’s own experience.
Anyway, to jump to the end, as it were, Thomas eventually studies for and passes the bar exam to become a lawyer. By now his perception of black justice has matured as he comes to terms with the fact he relays in the book that over 90 percent of black murder victims died at the hands of fellow blacks. He describes spending “a whole week trying to find a copy of Race and Economics and buying six copies when he finally did track it down knowing that I would want to have extra copies to lend or give away.”
The reality was not as simple as blaming black people’s woes on the “white devils” of Malcolm X’s early days, he now realizes. As he puts it in his autobiography, “I also grew more wary of unsupported generalizations and conspiracy theories, both of which had become indispensable features of radical arguments.”
The issue of the condition of blacks in the United States remained his central political cause. “As a young radical, I had found it easy to cloak my belief in the necessity of black self-reliance in the similar-sounding views of Malcolm X and the Back Muslims,” he writes, in one of very few direct references to his radical days. Another time he says that he hated himself for “having succumbed in college to radical ideologies,” and in a third reference he allows he had “been attracted to the Black Muslim philosophy of self-reliance ever since my radical days in college” and as a young man had praised Louis Farrakhan, aka “Louis X,” one of the key figures in the Nation of Islam movement that Malcolm X became an evangelist for.
Ultimately for Thomas, it was the exquisitely crafted 1,458 words of the Declaration of Independence that encapsulated the core principles of natural law—specifically the promise that “all men are created equal” and have certain unalienable rights that come with that inheritance.
Notes
1. The American church called the Nation of Islam was founded by Wallace Fard, also known as Wallace Fard Muhammad, in 1930.
2. Of course, New York City itself has many superb and completely free public libraries, like the palatial one on Fifth Avenue guarded by two massive stone lions. However, in Malcolm X’s youth, not only did state and local racial segregation laws flatly deny African Americans access to public facilities across the US South, informal barriers deterred them elsewhere too. Even today, grand libraries can be a little too grand sometimes, while smaller