Today in our History – October 15, 1991 - Clarence Thomas confirmed as an associate justice of the Supreme Court
GM – LIF – Today’s American Champion is an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. He was nominated by President George H. W. Bush on July 1, 1991, to succeed Thurgood Marshall and is the second African American to serve on the Court. His service began October 23, 1991. Upon the retirement of Anthony Kennedy in 2018, he became the longest-serving member of the Supreme Court, with a tenure of 28 years, 346 days as of October 15, 2020.
He grew up in Savannah, Georgia, and was educated at the College of the Holy Cross and Yale Law School. He was appointed an Assistant Attorney General in Missouri in 1974, and subsequently practiced law there in the private sector. In 1979, he became a legislative assistant to United States senator John Danforth, and in 1981 was appointed Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Education. In 1982, President Ronald Reagan appointed him of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC).
In 1990, President George H. W. Bush nominated him for a seat on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. He served in that role for 16 months, and on July 1, 1991, was nominated by Bush to fill Marshall's seat on the U.S. Supreme Court. His nomination was a bitter and intensely fought, centering on an accusation that he had sexually harassed attorney Anita Hill, a subordinate at the Department of Education and subsequently at the EEOC. Hill claimed that he had repeatedly made sexual and romantic overtures to her, despite her repeatedly rebuffing him and telling him to stop; he and his supporters claimed that Hill, witnesses who came forward on her behalf, and her supporters had fabricated the allegations to prevent a black conservative from getting a seat on the Supreme Court. The U.S. Senate ultimately confirmed him by a vote of 52–48.
Since joining the court, he has taken a textualist approach, seeking to uphold the original meaning of the United States Constitution and statutes. He is also, along with fellow justice Neil Gorsuch, an advocate of natural law jurisprudence. He is generally viewed as the most conservative member of the court. He is also known for almost never speaking during oral arguments.
Today in our History – October 15, 1991 - Clarence Thomas (born June 23, 1948), the Senate, voted to confirm Thomas as an associate justice of the Supreme Court by a 52–48 vote.
Clarence Thomas was born in 1948 in Pin Point, Georgia, a small, predominantly black community near Savannah founded by freedmen after the American Civil War. He was the second of three children born to M.C. Thomas, a farm worker, and Leola Williams, a domestic worker. They were descendants of American slaves, and the family spoke Gullah as a first language. Thomas's earliest known ancestors were slaves named Sandy and Peggy, who were born around the end of the 18th century and owned by wealthy planter Josiah Wilson of Liberty County, Georgia. M.C. left his family when Thomas was two years old. Thomas's mother worked hard but was sometimes paid only pennies per day. She had difficulty putting food on the table, and was forced to rely on charity. After a house fire left them homeless, Thomas and his younger brother Myers were taken to live with his maternal grandparents in Savannah, Georgia. Thomas was seven when the family moved in with his maternal grandfather, Myers Anderson, and Anderson's wife, Christine (née Hargrove), in Savannah.
Living with his grandparents, Thomas enjoyed amenities such as indoor plumbing and regular meals for the first time in his life. His grandfather, Myers Anderson, had little formal education, but had built a thriving fuel oil business that also sold ice. Thomas calls his grandfather "the greatest man I have ever known." When Thomas was 10, Anderson started taking the family to help at a farm every day from sunrise to sunset. His grandfather believed in hard work and self-reliance; he would counsel Thomas to "never let the sun catch you in bed." Thomas's grandfather also impressed upon his grandsons the importance of getting a good education.
Raised Catholic, he attended the majority-black St. Pius X high school for two years before transferring to St. John Vianney's Minor Seminary on the Isle of Hope, where he was an honor student and among very few black students. He also briefly attended Conception Seminary College, a Roman Catholic seminary in Missouri. No one in Thomas's family had attended college. In a number of interviews, Thomas stated that he left the seminary in the aftermath of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. He had overheard another student say after the shooting, "Good, I hope the son of a bitch died." He did not think the church did enough to combat racism.
At a nun's suggestion, Thomas attended the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts. While there, Thomas helped found the Black Student Union. Once, he walked out after an incident in which black students were punished while white students went undisciplined for committing the same violation; some of the priests negotiated with the protesting black students to re-enter the school.
Having spoken the Gullah language as a child, Thomas realized in college that he still sounded unpolished despite having been drilled in grammar at school, and he chose to major in English literature "to conquer the language." At Holy Cross, he was also a member of Alpha Sigma Nu and the Purple Key Society. Thomas graduated from Holy Cross in 1971 with an A.B. cum laude in English literature.
Thomas had a series of deferments from the military draft while in college at Holy Cross. Upon graduation, he was classified as 1-A and received a low lottery number, indicating he might be drafted to serve in Vietnam. Thomas failed his medical exam, due to curvature of the spine, and was not drafted.
Thomas entered Yale Law School, from which he received a Juris Doctor (J.D.) degree in 1974, graduating towards the middle of his class. Thomas has stated that his Yale Juris Doctor degree was not taken seriously by law firms to which he applied after graduating. He said that potential employers assumed he obtained it because of affirmative action policies. In 1969, Dean Louis Pollak wrote that the law school was expanding its program of quotas for black applicants, with up to 24 entering that year admitted under a system that deemphasized grades and LSAT scores.
In 1971, Thomas married his college sweetheart, Kathy Grace Ambush. They had one child, Jamal Adeen. They separated in 1981 and 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.
Thomas's second wife remained active in conservative politics, serving as a consultant to the Heritage Foundation, and as founder and president of Liberty Central. In 2011, she stepped down from Liberty Central to open a conservative lobbying firm, touting her "experience and connections", meeting with newly elected Republican congressmen and describing herself as an "ambassador to the tea party". Also in 2011, 74 Democratic members of the House of Representatives wrote that Thomas should recuse himself on cases regarding the Affordable Care Act, due to "appearance of a conflict of interest" based on the work of his wife.
Thomas was reconciled to the Catholic Church in the mid-1990s. In his 2007 autobiography, he criticized the church for its failure to grapple with racism in the 1960s during the civil rights movement, saying it was not so "adamant about ending racism then as it is about ending abortion now". Thomas is (as of 2019) one of 14 practicing Catholic justices in the Court's history, of 114 justices total, and one of five currently serving (along with Samuel Alito, Brett Kavanaugh, John Roberts, and Sonia Sotomayor).
In January 2011, the liberal advocacy group Common Cause reported that between 2003 and 2007 Thomas failed to disclose $686,589 in income earned by his wife from the Heritage Foundation, instead reporting "none" where "spousal noninvestment income" would be reported on his Supreme Court financial disclosure forms. The following week, Thomas stated that the disclosure of his wife's income had been "inadvertently omitted due to a misunderstanding of the filing instructions". Thomas amended reports going back to 1989.
In 2016, Moira Smith, a lawyer, claimed that Thomas groped her at a dinner party in 1999, when she was a Truman Foundation scholar. Thomas called the allegation "preposterous". Since 1999, Thomas and his wife have traveled across the U.S. in a motor coach between Court terms. Research more about this great American Champion and share it with your babies. Make it a champion day!