Clarence Thomas (born June 23, 1948) is an American lawyer and jurist who has served as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States since 1991. Nominated by President George H. W. Bush to succeed Thurgood Marshall, Thomas is the second African American to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court and the second longest-serving U.S. Supreme Court justice in history.
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. A devout Catholic, Thomas initially intended to be a priest in the Catholic Church but withdrew from seminary after experiencing racism. He graduated with honors from the College of the Holy Cross in 1971 and earned his Juris Doctor in 1974 from Yale Law School. After law school, he became an assistant attorney general in Missouri, a legislative assistant to U.S. senator John Danforth in 1979, and 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) in 1982.
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. The Senate confirmed Thomas by a vote of 52–48, the narrowest margin in a century.
Since the death of Antonin Scalia, Thomas has been the Court's foremost originalist, stressing what he considers the original meaning in interpreting the U.S. Constitution. Until 2020, Thomas was known for his silence during most oral arguments, though he has since begun asking more questions to counsel. 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 (where he argued 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 justice.
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. The family were descendants of enslaved people and spoke the creole language Gullah as a first language. Thomas's older sister, Emma, was born in 1946, and his younger brother, Myers, in 1949. His 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. Sandy Wilson, his distant ancestor, was an enslaved plantation worker who was brought from Georgia to Charleston, South Carolina, and, after the end of the Civil War, registered to vote in 1867.
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.
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.
When Thomas was 10 years old, Anderson began putting his grandsons to work during the summers, and Thomas helped build a house on a plot of farmland his grandfather owned. Anderson believed in hard work and self-reliance, never showed his grandsons affection, beat them frequently according to Leola, and impressed the importance of education on his grandchildren. 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. Anderson, a convert to Catholicism, sent Thomas to be educated at a series of Catholic schools. Thomas attended the predominantly black St. Pius X High School in Chatham County for two years before transferring in September 1964 to St. John Vianney's Minor Seminary on the Isle of Hope, where he was the only black student in the segregated boarding school. Despite being hazed, he excelled academically, gained a reputation as a hard worker, and became the co-editor of its newspaper, the Pioneer. During this time, he spent many hours at the Carnegie Library, the only library for blacks in Savannah before libraries were desegregated in 1961. His academic accomplishments made him the target of racist remarks by classmates, contributing to a spiritual crisis in which he began to doubt the teachings of the Catholic Church. But because of his academic record, the school's faculty voted to nominate Thomas as a candidate for the priesthood.
In the fall of 1967, Thomas, the first in his family to attend college and graduate from high school, entered Conception Seminary College, a Benedictine seminary in Missouri, training to become a priest. On April 4, 1968, the day of 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". The display of racism moved Thomas to leave the seminary. He thought the church should do more to combat racism and resolved to abandon the priesthood, subsequently withdrawing from seminary.
College of the Holy Cross and Yale Law School
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 in August 1968. He was awarded a full academic scholarship, endowed in honor of Martin Luther King Jr. 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 trial attorney Theodore V. Wells, Jr., the running back Eddie Jenkins, and the novelist Edward P. Jones. In the fall of 1968, Thomas and other black students founded the college's Black Student Union (BSU), which became an important part of their campus identity. He was first elected the union's secretary-treasurer, then was elected its chairman in his senior year. Without financial support from his grandfather, he defrayed his expenses by working as a waiter and dishwasher in the college's dining hall, Kimball Hall. Thomas later recalled, "I was 19. My only hope was Holy Cross".