In the summer of 1974, after mornings of pumping weights and hours of studying law, Clarence Thomas often sat at the dinner table with Margaret Bush Wilson in St. Louis to debate the status of black Americans.
Wilson, a national civil rights leader and lawyer who took Thomas in for the summer while he studied for the bar examination, argued that the federal government should lead the fight against discrimination.
Thomas, reared by a grandfather who preached self-reliance and taught by nuns who preached education and hard work, countered that blacks relied too much on government, that they should make it on their own.
At summer`s end, Wilson offered a word of advice to her strong-willed young house guest: ”Clarence, the one thing you must not be is one-dimensional . . . Read everything you can get your hands on so you
understand the climate of the times.
”I was telling him, `Don`t be an ideologue,` ” Wilson recalled. ”In recent years, he has told me that is the best advice he has ever received.”
As the time approaches for Senate hearings on his nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court, perhaps the key question facing Thomas is whether he has put Wilson`s advice into practice. Is he an unswerving, dogmatic conservative, as some critics have said, or can he put aside personal philosophy when interpreting the law?
The answer is not easy. Clarence Thomas is a gnarl of contradiction, a most unusual mix: black, Catholic and a Southerner.
A victim of segregation, he is not convinced that integration ensures better schools. A beneficiary of affirmative action, he believes government should try to address discrimination against individuals rather than focusing on large groups.
Although he talks often of self-help, he benefited from powerful mentors. After arriving in the upper middle class, he criticized his older sister for being dependent on welfare.
His life was shaped by regimen, respect for authority and a notion that the force of will could take you where you wanted to go. His philosophy is the product of diverse influences: The lessons in the Roman Catholic Baltimore catechism, the black nationalism of Malcolm X, the economic independence of the Hoover Institute`s Thomas Sowell, Yale Law School and the political conservatism of Ronald Reagan.
But those who have been quick to label him, friends and former colleagues say, may have made a mistake.
”You cannot pinpoint Clarence Thomas,” said Wilson, whom Thomas called to thank the day President Bush nominated him to replace Justice Thurgood Marshall. ”He listens. And he thinks for himself out of his experience and his innate sense of fairness.”
More Top Picks Gazebos
Much more than Justice David Souter, President Bush`s only appointment to the Supreme Court, Thomas engineered a high, and sometimes controversial, profile for himself in Washington. Using a bureaucratic post as his pulpit, he wrote and spoke extensively, challenging accepted wisdom about civil rights and race relations.
To that extent, he already is known. The dissection of his views, by interest groups, news media and senators, has been proceeding full force.
But to understand Thomas requires understanding his roots in starkly segregated rural Georgia.
Thomas was born June 23, 1948, in Pin Point, Ga., a languorous, moldering settlement of tiny homes, giant oaks and about 200 people 15 miles south of Savannah on the marshy edge of the Moon River. Johnny Mercer, who wrote the lyrics to the song of the same name, lived on other side of its banks.
Still salty aired and scarcely changed by the forces of hurricanes or time, poverty stricken Pin Point retains its natural beauty. Thomas` older sister, Emma Mae Martin, still lives there in a run-down wooden house at the end of a narrow sand road.
Delivered by a midwife to a teenage mother, Clarence Thomas lived in a five-room board house without a toilet or a telephone. Before he was 2, his father abandoned the family for Philadelphia. His mother, Leola Williams, supported her children on $30 a week earned from picking crab meat for 5 cents a pound. The most common family meals were grits, improved with butter and egg or shredded crab.
Money was always scarce, and shortly after the house burned down, when he was about 8, Clarence and his younger brother, Myers, were sent to live with their grandparents in Savannah. Emma Mae stayed with an aunt.
”Leola worked hard,” said Thad Harris, 74, who often took care of Clarence while his mother worked. ”But she just couldn`t support those kids alone.”
His mother, who lives in Savannah, now works at a hospital in the morning and cares for an elderly woman in the evenings.
The loss of a father was made up by the formidable presence of Thomas`
maternal grandfather, Myers Anderson, a man he came to call Daddy. Anderson started a coal delivery business by fastening an iron axle and wheels onto a large wooden box, later expanding into delivery of wood, ice and fuel oil. He fashioned cinder blocks to build homes.
Though kind, he also could be demanding of his grandsons. They helped in the fuel business and also worked on his farm outside of Savannah. Thomas once said he sometimes felt his grandparents were ”too rigid and their expectations were too high.” (Thomas` niece and nephew would later say something similar about him.)
The grandparents, however, did ”teach us to fend for ourselves and to do that in an openly hostile environment,” Thomas has said.
Anderson realized his grandson`s chances were best with a good education, so he scraped together $20 tuition and sent Clarence, who was born a Baptist, to St. Benedict the Moor, a now-closed Roman Catholic school for black children run by white Franciscan nuns.
What Anderson, a nearly illiterate man, could not offer his grandson, the Irish nuns of St. Benedict could. Thomas was a bright student, an altar boy, patrol boy and athlete who could be quiet and reflective but also full of mischief.
The insulation of private school did not spare the students the public indignities of segregation. Blacks were not allowed in the cathedral a few blocks away from the school, said classmate Roy Allen, now a Democratic state senator in Georgia.
Until St. Benedict`s built a new church in 1949, chicken wire ran up the middle aisle to separate white and black parishioners.
The nuns did not abide the racism, and they rode in the back of the bus with their students and sat with them on segregated beaches. They also drilled into the children the conviction that they could succeed.
”What we impressed on these children, in these segregated schools, who had so very little was that their only hope was in education,” said Sister Virgilius, one of Thomas` teachers. ”That Clarence knew how to study, I think that was my greatest contribution to him.”
Years later, she said, Thomas tracked her down at a retirement home and asked, ”How come you sisters could do so much for us black kids that nobody else could?”
”My answer to him on that was we were working because we knew the children were very special children in God`s eyes,” she said.
The nuns remain special to Thomas. He contributes money to help support their retirement. He choked back tears on national television as he thanked them shortly after being nominated to the Supreme Court, the only time his mother can recall seeing him cry.
From St. Benedict`s, Thomas went to a seminary preparatory school, then to his first year of college at a Catholic seminary, Immaculate Conception, in Conception Junction, Mo.
Thomas has said he became disillusioned with the seminary April 4, 1968, the day Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, when he overheard another student say, ”I hope he dies.” Abbott James Jones, however, said Thomas probably left because ”he just felt he didn`t want to be a priest.”
He transferred to Holy Cross, a Jesuit college set on a hilltop overlooking Worcester, Mass. After years of trying to blend in with whites in school, Thomas started to assert his blackness at Holy Cross. He donned the fatigues of the Black Panthers, and helped found the black student union. He helped start a free-lunch program for black school children. He participated in boycotts.
He read the black nationalist message of Malcolm X, who believed that blacks had to help themselves and force change and not rely on whites for their advancement.
Like many of his generation, Thomas also experimented with marijuana, which he disclosed to the Bush administration two years ago, when he was nominated to the U.S. Court of Appeals. Administration officials said they do not consider this drug use a problem.
After graduating with honors in English, he married Kathy Ambush, a college student from Worcester, and headed for Yale Law School. School officials, while characterizing him as a ”good catch” said he also likely benefited from an informal affirmative action policy at a school with one of the most rigorous admissions standards in the nation.
At Yale his signature was bib overalls. His message: ”I am a son of the rural South.”
More Top Picks How We Test
”It was a political statement,” said Lani Guinier, a University of Pennsylvania law professor who was one of 14 black students in Thomas` first- year law school class, ”that he closely identified with his origins.”
Today, Thomas` prominence as a conservative confounds his former classmates. ”I don`t recall Clarence at the time ever expressing any views remotely comparable with the views he is publicly identified with (now),”
Guinier said.
Theodie Peterson, another law school friend, who teaches at Widener University Law School in Harrisburg, Pa., said Thomas would bring
”understanding and compassion” to the court.
”Clarence marched to a different drummer,” Peterson said. ”But his experience is an experience that is common with a segment of the world. He will bring that perspective to the court.”