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US Supreme Court justice since 1991

For other people named Clarence Thomas, see Clarence Thomas (disambiguation).

Clarence Thomas (born June 23, 1948) is an American lawyer and jurist who has served since 1991 as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. President George H. W. Bushnominated him to succeed Thurgood Marshall. After Marshall, Thomas is the second African American to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court and has been its longest-serving member since Anthony Kennedy's retirement in 2018. He has also been the Court's oldest member since Stephen Breyer retired in 2022.

Thomas was born in Pin Point, Georgia. After his father abandoned the family, he was raised by his grandfather in a poor Gullah community near Savannah, Georgia. Growing up as a devout Catholic, Thomas originally intended to be a priest in the Catholic Church but became dissatisfied with its efforts to combat racism and abandoned his aspiration to join the clergy. He graduated with honors from the College of the Holy Cross in 1971 and earned his Juris Doctor in 1974 from Yale Law School. Upon graduating, he was appointed as an assistant attorney general in Missouri and later entered private practice there. He became a legislative assistant to U.S. Senator John Danforth in 1979, and was made Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Education in 1981. President Ronald Reagan appointed Thomas as Chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) the next year.

President George H. W. Bush nominated Thomas to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in 1990. He served in that role for 19 months before filling Marshall's seat on the Supreme Court. Thomas's confirmation hearings were bitter and intensely fought, centering on an accusation that he had sexually harassed Anita Hill, a subordinate at the Department of Education and the EEOC.^[5] The Senate confirmed Thomas by a vote of 52–48, the narrowest margin in a century.^[6]

Since the death of Antonin Scalia, Thomas has been the Court's foremost originalist, stressing the original meaning in interpreting the U.S. Constitution. In contrast to Scalia—who had been the only other consistent originalist—he pursues a more classically liberal variety of originalism.^[8] Until 2020, Thomas was known for his silence during most oral arguments, though has since begun asking more questions to counsel.^[10] He is notable for his majority opinions in Good News Club v. Milford Central School (determining the freedom of religious speech in relation to the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution) and New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen (affirming the individual right to bear arms outside the home), as well as his dissent in Gonzales v. Raich (arguing that the U.S. Congress may not criminalize the private cultivation of medical cannabis). He is widely considered to be the Court's most conservative member.

Early life

Thomas was born on June 23, 1948, in his parents' wooden shack in Pin Point, Georgia. Pin Point was a small community near Savannah founded by freedmen in the 1880s. He was the second of three children of M.C. Thomas, a farm worker, and Leola Williams. Williams had been born out of wedlock; after her mother's death, she was sent from Liberty County, Georgia, to live with an aunt in Pin Point.^[15] The family were descendants of enslaved people and spoke Gullah as a first language.^[17] Thomas's earliest known ancestors were slaves named Sandy and Peggy, who were born in the late 18th century and owned by wealthy planter Josiah Wilson of Liberty County. Thomas's older sister, Emma, was born in 1946, and his younger brother, Myers, in 1949.

Upon becoming pregnant with Thomas's older sister, Leola was expelled from her Baptist church and dropped out of high school after the 10th grade; her father ordered her to marry M.C. in January 1947. After three years of marriage, M.C. sued for divorce, claiming that Leola neglected the children, and a judge granted the request in March 1951. After the divorce, M.C. moved to Savannah and later Pennsylvania, visiting his children only once. Leola went to work as a maid in Savannah during the week and returned to Pin Point on the weekends. Custody of the children was awarded to Leola's aunt.^[21] When her aunt's house burned down in 1955, Leola took her children to live with her in the room she rented in a tenement with an outdoor toilet in Savannah, leaving her daughter with the aunt in Pin Point. She asked her father, Myers Anderson, for help. He initially refused but agreed after his wife threatened to throw him out.

Thomas and his brother went to live with Anderson, his maternal grandfather, in 1955 and experienced amenities such as indoor plumbing and regular meals for the first time. Despite having little formal education, Anderson had built a successful business delivering coal, oil, and ice. When racial unrest led to widespread protest and marches in Savannah from 1960 to 1963, Anderson used his wealth to bail out demonstrators and took his grandchildren to meetings promoted by the NAACP. Thomas has described his grandfather as the person who has influenced his life the most.

Anderson converted to Catholicism and sent Thomas to be educated at a series of Catholic schools. Thomas attended the predominantly black St. Pius X High School in Chatham County^[27] for two years before transferring to St. John Vianney's Minor Seminary on the Isle of Hope, where he was the segregated boarding school's first black student.^[28][29] Though he experienced hazing, he performed well academically.^[15] He spent many hours at the Carnegie Library, the only library for Blacks in Savannah before libraries were desegregated in 1961.^[31][a]

When Thomas was ten years old, Anderson began putting his grandsons to work during the summers, helping him build a house on a plot of farmland he owned, building fences, and doing farm work. He believed in hard work and self-reliance, never showed his grandsons affection, beat them frequently according to Leola, and impressed the importance of a good education on them. Anderson taught Thomas that "all of our rights as human beings came from God, not man", and that racial segregation was a violation of divine law.

College of the Holy Cross and Yale Law School

During his freshman year from 1967 to 1968, Thomas attended Conception Seminary College, a Benedictine seminary in Missouri, with the intent to become a priest; no one in Thomas's family had attended college before.^[28] After Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination, he overheard a fellow student say, "Good. I hope the son of a bitch dies" and "[t]hat's what they should do to all the niggers".^[39][40] The display of racism moved Thomas to leave the seminary. He thought the church did not do enough to combat racism and resolved to abandon the priesthood. He left at the end of the semester.

At a nun's suggestion, Thomas enrolled at the College of the Holy Cross, an elite Catholic college in Massachusetts, as a sophomore transfer student on a full academic scholarship.^[43][44] He was one of the college's first black students, being one of twenty recruited by President John E. Brooks in 1968 in a group that also included the future attorney Ted Wells, the running back Eddie Jenkins Jr., and the novelist Edward P. Jones.^[45] In the fall of that year, Thomas and other black students founded the college's Black Student Union (BSU), which became an important part of their campus identity.^[46] Without financial support from his grandfather, he defrayed his expenses by working as a waiter and dishwasher in the college's dining hall.^[47] Thomas later recalled, "I was 19. My only hope was Holy Cross College".^[48]

Professors at Holy Cross remembered Thomas as a determined, diligent student. He kept to a strict routine of studying alone and stayed back during holidays to continue working. Thomas C. Lawler, an English professor at Holy Cross,^[51] recalled him as having "never talked very much in class. He was the kind of person you really might not notice". By contrast, he was outspoken at BSU meetings, distinguishing himself as a contrarian who often feuded with Ted Wells. Eddie Jenkins, a BSU member, said Thomas "could turn on a dime and reduce you to intellectual rubble". Edward P. Jones, who lived across from Thomas as a sophomore, reflected that "there was a fierce determination I sensed from him [Thomas], that he was going to get as much as he could and get as far, ultimately, as he could".^[54]

Thomas became a vocal student activist as an undergraduate. He became acquainted with black separatism, the black Muslim Movement, the black power movement, and displayed a poster of Malcolm X in his dormitory room. When some black students were disproportionately punished in comparison with white students for the same violation, he suggested a walkout in protest. The BSU adopted his idea, and Thomas, along with sixty other black students, departed campus. Some of the priests negotiated with the protesting black students to reenter the school.^[28] When administrators granted amnesty to all protesters, Thomas returned to the college, later also to attend anti-war marches. In April 1970, he participated in the violent 1970 Harvard Square riots. He has credited his protests for his turn toward conservatism and subsequent disillusionment with leftist movements.^[61][54]

Having struggled with English as a native speaker of Gullah, Thomas chose to major in English literature.^[63] He became a member of Alpha Sigma Nu, the Jesuit honor society, and the Purple Key Society, of which he was the only black member. The college's focus on a liberal arts education introduced him to the writings of black intellectuals such as Richard Wright, whose literary works Thomas sympathized with. His admiration of Malcolm X led him to read The Autobiography of Malcolm X to the point of wearing down the pages of his copy.^[65]

Thomas graduated from Holy Cross on June 4, 1971, with a Bachelor of Arts, cum laude, ranked ninth in his class.^[66] He applied to and was accepted by Yale Law School, Harvard Law School, and the University of Pennsylvania Law School.^[68] That same year, Thomas matriculated at Yale Law School as one of twelve black students. Yale offered him the best financial aid package, and he was attracted to the civil rights activism of some of its faculty members. Finding it difficult to keep up with the school's expectations, he struggled to connect with other students who came from upper-class backgrounds. He enrolled in Yale's most difficult courses and became a student of the property law scholar Quintin Johnstone, who became his favorite professor. Johnstone remembered Thomas as having "performed very well".Guido Calabresi, the dean of Yale Law School, described Thomas and fellow student Hillary Clinton as "both excellent students [who] had the same kind of reputation".

Thomas obtained his Juris Doctor on May 20, 1974. After graduation, he sought to enter private practice as a corporate lawyer in Atlanta, Georgia. He saw his experience in law school as disappointing, as law firms assumed he was accepted because of affirmative action. According to Thomas, the law firms also "asked pointed questions, unsubtly suggesting that they doubted I was as smart as my grades indicated".^[78] In his 2007 memoir, he wrote: "I peeled a fifteen-cent sticker off a package of cigars and stuck it on the frame of my law degree to remind myself of the mistake I'd made by going to Yale. I never did change my mind about its value." Hill, Jones, and Farrington, the Savannah law firm where Thomas had interned the previous summer, offered him a job upon graduation, but he declined.

Early legal career

With no job offers from major law firms, Thomas took a position as an associate with Missouri attorney general John Danforth, who offered him the prospect of practicing what he liked. Thomas moved to Saint Louis to study for the Missouri bar, and was admitted on September 13, 1974. He remained financially destitute even after leaving Yale, trying unsuccessfully on one occasion to make money by selling his blood at a blood bank, and hoped that by working for Danforth he might later acquire a job in private practice.

From 1974 to 1977, Thomas was an assistant attorney general of Missouri—the only African-American member of Danforth's staff. He worked first in the office's criminal appeals division and later in the revenue and taxation division. Thomas conducted lawsuits independently, gaining a reputation as a fair but controversial prosecutor. Years later, after he joined the Supreme Court, Thomas recalled his position in Missouri as "the best job I've ever had".

When Danforth was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1976, Thomas left to become an attorney in Monsanto's legal department in Saint Louis. He found the job unsatisfying, so left to rejoin Danforth in Washington, D.C., as a legislative assistant. From 1979 to 1981, he handled energy issues for the Senate Commerce Committee. Thomas, who had switched his party affiliation from Democratic to Republican while working for Danforth in Missouri, soon drew the attention of officials in the newly elected Reagan Administration as a black conservative. Pendleton James, Reagan's personnel director, offered Thomas the position of assistant secretary for civil rights at the U.S. Department of Education. Initially reluctant, Thomas agreed after Danforth and others pressed him to take the post.

President Ronald Reagan nominated Thomas as assistant secretary of education for the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) on May 1, 1981.^[93][94] The Senate received the nomination on May 28, 1981, and Thomas was quickly confirmed before the Senate Labor and Human Resources Committee on June 19, succeeding Cynthia Brown at the age of 32.^[96] He held the position for a brief period before James offered him a new position as chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), a promotion that Thomas believed, as with his position in the OCR, was because of his race. After James consulted the President, Thomas hesitantly took up the chair with Reagan's approval.

Thomas chaired the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) from 1982 to 1990. As chairman, he was tasked with enforcing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 in an agency that had been mutually resented by both Democrats and Republicans. He announced a reorganization of the EEOC and upgraded its record-keeping under an uncompromising leadership that eschewed racial quotas. Concerned by the EEOC's limited statutory authority, Thomas sought to impose criminal penalties for employers who practiced employment discrimination, moving to shift funding towards agency investigators. Though he had been critical of affirmative action, Thomas also opposed the Reagan Administration's agenda to remove affirmative action policies, believing it to be a detraction from socioeconomic issues.

During Thomas's tenure, he was credited with improving the efficiency of the EEOC. Settlement award amounts to victims of discrimination tripled, while the number of suits filed decreased. The EEOC's lack of the use of goals and timetables drew criticism from civil rights advocates, who lobbied representatives to review the EEOC's practices; Thomas testified before Congress more than 50 times. Near the end of his final term, the EEOC came under congressional scrutiny for the mishandling of age-discrimination cases.

District of Columbia Court of Appeals

In early 1989, President George H. W. Bush expressed interest in nominating Thomas to a federal judgeship. Thomas, now at age 41, initially rejected the position, believing himself unready to make a lifetime commitment to being a judge. White House Counsel C. Boyden Gray and White House Chief of Staff John H. Sununu advocated for his nomination, and Judge Laurence Silberman advised Thomas to accept an appointment. Anticipating Thomas's nomination, a liberal coalition—including the Alliance for Justice and the National Organization for Women (NOW)—emerged to oppose his candidacy.

On October 30, 1989, President George H. W. Bush nominated Thomas to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to fill the seat vacated by Robert Bork.^[107] Thomas gained the support of other African American officials, including former transportation secretary William Coleman, and said that when meeting white Democratic staffers in the United States Senate, he was "struck by how easy it had become for sanctimonious whites to accuse a black man of not caring about civil rights".^[65]

In February 1990, the Senate Judiciary Committee recommended Thomas by a vote of 12 to 1. On March 6, 1990, the Senate confirmed him to the Court of Appeals by a vote of 98 to 2. He developed cordial relationships during his 19 months on the federal court, including with Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg.^[65] During his judgeship, Thomas authored 19 opinions.

Nomination to the Supreme Court

Main article: Clarence Thomas Supreme Court nomination

When Justice William Brennan retired from the Supreme Court in July 1990, Thomas was Bush's favorite among the five candidates on his shortlist for the position. However, Bush's advisors, including Attorney General Dick Thornburgh, considered Thomas inexperienced, and he instead nominated David Souter of the First Circuit Court of Appeals.^[65] A year later, Justice Thurgood Marshall announced his retirement on June 27, 1991, and Bush nominated Thomas to replace him.^[112] Bush announced his selection on July 1, calling Thomas the "best qualified at this time".^[65] Thornburgh cautioned Bush that replacing Marshall with any candidate who was not perceived to share Marshall's views would make confirmation difficult.

Liberal interest groups sought to challenge Thomas's nomination by paralleling the same strategy used against Robert Bork's confirmation. Abortion-rights groups, including the National Abortion Rights Action League and the NOW, were concerned that Thomas would be among those to overrule Roe v. Wade. Republican officials in turn emphasized his personal history and gathered support from African American interest groups, including the NAACP. Other civil rights organizations, such as the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the National Urban League