Thomas missed serving in Vietnam through student deferments, a medical disqualification and some luck. When he transferred from the seminary to Holy Cross, he was classified draft-eligible and passed a military physical but was not called up before receiving a student deferment for three years. In 1971, when he entered law school, he again was classified draft-eligible but failed the physical because of curvature of the spine.
Instead of following others with Ivy League law degrees to high-paying jobs-Thomas said he rejected such offers to do mostly pro bono work to represent the poor and minorities-he accepted a job with Missouri Atty. Gen. John Danforth, a fellow Yale graduate who is currently a Republican U.S. senator from Missouri.
It forged one of the most important relationships in Thomas` career. Danforth, heir to the Ralston Purina fortune, became the political patron of the man born dirt poor in Georgia. In Danforth, Thomas told colleagues, he thought he had found someone who offered him a job on merit, not race.
To underscore his independence, he hung a Confederate flag on his wall, a small act that reflected a broader defiance.
”He said, `I want to be able to say I earned everything I got and maybe twice as much as the white guy sitting next to me,` ” said Neil Bernstein, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis who worked in the attorney general`s office at the time.
Thomas surprised his colleagues by becoming an adherent of the conservative views of Hoover Institute economist Thomas Sowell, a black who advocates economic self-help.
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Later, as chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Thomas used frequent letters to the editor, law journal articles and speeches to question everything from busing for desegregation to the minimum wage.
Those writings make his views easier to read than the last Supreme Court nominee, Souter, but leave unclear how Thomas would apply his philosophy to issues that could come before the high court.
He has argued that hiring preferences fuel the belief that women and minorities ”are permanently disabled and in need of handouts.” Maintaining that affirmative action limits the rights of individuals to recover from employers who discriminate, he has favored criminal punishment for those employers.
The Constitution, he said, must be interpreted ”in a color-blind fashion” in a color-blind society. ”Hence, I emphasize black self-help, as opposed to racial quotas and other race-conscious legal devices.”
In a 1983 speech to the Association of Black MBAs, Thomas even praised Black Muslim leader Louis Farrakhan for his message of self help. However, Farrakhan has since stirred enormous controversy because of anti-Semitic remarks he made in 1984.
Washington public relations executive Armstrong Williams said he wrote Thomas` speech while working as his spokesman and added a quote from Farrakhan at the end. Williams said Thomas admired Farrakhan`s emphasis on self sufficiency but gave the speech before the Muslim leader had become controversial.
Thomas said in a statement Friday that he is ”adamantly opposed to anti- Semitism and bigotry of any kind including by Louis Farrakhan. . . . While I support the concept of economic self-help, I have never supported or tolerated bigotry of any kind.”
He also believes in a constitutional interpretation that takes into account a ”higher law” or ”natural rights” based on moral principles and
”the law of God.” His idea of ”original intention” derives not from the Constitution but from the principle embodied in the phrase that ”all men are created equal” in the Declaration of Independence. The more mainstream view is that the Constitution is the charter of government and the Declaration is a prescription for revolution.
He also criticized the Supreme Court`s 1954 ruling in Brown vs. Board of Education for focusing on segregation`s psychological effect on black children rather than on its basic injustice.
He praised conservative author, Lewis Lehrman, who said that a higher law might encompass a right to life for the unborn.
That, however, is the only solid clue to Thomas` views on abortion.
Though raised a Catholic, Thomas for the past year has regularly attended and contributed financially to an Episcopal church where some members are involved in charismatic renewal and anti-abortion efforts. However, the parish administrator of 3,000-member Truro Episcopal Church in Fairfax, Va., could not say whether Thomas took part in those activities.
Thomas and his first wife, Kathy, separated in 1981 and divorced in 1984. He got custody of their son, Jamal, who recently graduated from high school and plans to attend Virginia Military Institute. Kathy Thomas` father, Nelson Ambush, said the two simply grew apart and mutually agreed that the son would live with the father. Ambush and Thomas have remained close and Ambush said he could ”talk all afternoon” and not have a negative word to say about his former son-in-law.
Thomas attempted to instill the work ethic of Myers Anderson in his son, and in his sister`s children. His niece, Leola Martin, 14, said that he recently invited her to live with him and attend private school, telling her she was smart and should make something of herself.
”My brother, who`s in the Navy, he stayed with him for a few months, but he came home,” she said. ”He said it was too hard to keep up with what uncle wanted him to do.”
Their mother, Emma Mae Martin, who now works in a Savannah hospital, at one time supported herself and her children on welfare. Thomas once criticized his sister for accepting welfare and has used her in speeches and interviews as an example of what he sees as the problem of dependence on government benefits.
Thomas` brother Myers works as an accountant in Bloomfield, Conn., a suburb of Hartford.
In 1987 Thomas married Nebraskan Virginia Lamp, then a U.S. Chamber of Commerce lobbyist and now a Labor Department lawyer, whom he met at an Anti-Defamation League meeting in New York.
Thomas shot to prominence after attending a conference of black conservatives in 1980. He was roundly criticized-but noticed by Ronald Reagan`s head of minority recruitment.
Despite his aversion to traditional minority jobs, Thomas accepted two civil rights positions, first heading civil rights enforcement in the Education Department, then as EEOC chairman.
He found the EEOC to be a troubled agency with inadequate fiscal controls. His efforts to reorganize included policy shifts that infuriated interest groups representing women and the elderly. An unpublished 1988 report by a special Senate Committee on Aging found ”mismanagement at the highest levels of the EEOC” in handling of age-discrimination cases and urged immediate correction of ”serious deficiencies” in enforcement.
Thomas also angered civil rights activists by de-emphasizing broad class- action cases-likely to result in hiring goals and timetables for women and minorities-in favor of individual discrimination claims with less sweeping impact.
Although he clashed with other Reagan administration officials over enforcement of civil rights laws, Thomas eventually became an administration defender. At the same time, he publicly lamented that conservatives turned their backs on blacks.
Washington lawyer Harry Singleton, a law school classmate who succeeded Thomas at the Education Department, said Thomas tried to ”mitigate the damage” and would not work ”to turn the clock back on our civil rights advancements.”
During his brief tenure on the appeals court, Thomas has voted conservatively but not ruled on especially controversial issues.
Civil rights groups did not formally oppose his nomination to the appeals court, and only two senators voted against his confirmation last year. However, Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee said their endorsement should not be read as support for his Supreme Court nomination.
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He is expected to face opposition from senators who believe that Thomas`
self-help ideology obscures his ability to rule dispassionately on issues facing the nation`s downtrodden, historically the high court`s role.
Aldon Morris, a professor of sociology at Northwestern University and an authority on the civil rights movement, sees Thomas as a cynical political symbol that ultimately could hurt minorities and the poor.
Morris said senators should scrutinize Thomas` ideas as rigorously as they did Judge Robert Bork`s before rejecting him for the Supreme Court in 1987, and not be swept up in his compelling biography.
”To keep playing up this business that he worked hard is to engage people in the very seductive kind of view that suggests all people who are poor or oppressed in our society are there because they don`t work hard,”
Morris said.
Morris contends the conservative movement has help to
”institutionalize” a backlash against the gains of the civil rights movement. ”The real concern is that Clarence Thomas, along with the other justices, will play a central role in making permanent the backlash against the civil rights movement.”
Thomas last week acknowledged a debt to the civil rights movement, specifically mentioning Thurgood Marshall, the NAACP and the Urban League.
Margaret Bush Wilson, former chairwoman of the NAACP, has a different take on Thomas. She vests much confidence in him as he attempts to become only the second black on the U.S. Supreme Court, and at age 43, a justice whose impact on the nation could be felt for more than 40 years.
”To me, Clarence is the epitome of the strength endemic to black people,” Wilson said. ”His grandfather was a terribly strong person, a person with inner strength. It is something you learned in church. You don`t let anyone bear you down to spiritual defeat.”