The Supreme Court justices were hearing oral arguments when the court room went silent.
“One question,” Clarence Thomas said during a hearing before the court in February, 2016. The case was over two men who argued that their guilty pleas in a domestic violence case should not ban them from owning guns. “This is a misdemeanor violation. It suspends a constitutional right. Can you give me another area where a misdemeanor violation suspends a constitutional right?”
Members of the crowd gasped when the question was asked.
This wasn’t a dramatic question or a particularly monumental case. But it was a major moment for the court, because after a decade of silence, Clarence Thomas had finally spoken up.
Welcome to our newest series on the nine Supreme Court justices. We’re starting with the justice who’s been on the court the longest. Join us each week for another installment.
For his first ten years on the court, Thomas said very little during oral arguments. When asked why he didn’t participate in questioning lawyers, Thomas said he thought the justices asked too many questions, and that the level of questioning was actually rude to the lawyers who were presenting their arguments. He felt he could learn all he needed from reading the briefs and the lower court transcripts.
Thomas also pointed to his childhood, saying he was teased so mercilessly about the dialect he grew up speaking and the accent he had that it was safer to just stop talking.
Clarence Thomas, who was born June 23, 1948, grew up speaking Gullah Geechee. Gullah Geechee is a creole language, one that is a mixture of several West African dialects and English. He lived in the segregated Jim Crow South in a tiny community founded by formerly enslaved people on the coast of Georgia.
When Thomas was young, his father left his family, and Thomas was sent to live with his maternal grandparents. He later wrote that his grandfather, whom he called “daddy,” was the “one hero in my life. What I am is what he made me.”
Throughout his schooling, Thomas faced racism and prejudice from Black and white students alike, mostly because of his dark skin and Gullah Geechee heritage. His schoolhouse nickname was ABC, for “America’s Blackest Child,” and his classmates would taunt him saying, “If he were any blacker, he’d be blue.”
Thomas didn’t originally plan to be a judge. In 1964, he entered a seminary to become a Catholic priest.
But once he was there, he found that the Church didn’t do enough to combat racism. Once, in the classroom, a student passed Thomas a folded note. The front said “I like Martin Luther King Jr.” When it was opened up, it read, “dead.”
After MLK Jr. was killed, Thomas left the seminary, and went to College of the Holy Cross, in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he earned a degree in English literature. The summer before he began at Holy Cross, white students took a survey. More than 25% of Thomas’s classmates agreed that Black people have “less ambition,” “looser morals” and “smell different” than white people.
At Holy Cross, Thomas leaned into activism. He started the Black Student Union, which argued for more Black students, faculty, and courses in Black literature and history. The group’s manifesto contained a statement about how Black men do not “need or want the white woman,” and Thomas himself was against interracial marriage until 1986, when he met his second wife Virginia (Ginny) Lamp, who is white.
After graduation, Thomas moved on to Yale Law School, seeing a career in law as a way to combine his faith and his passion for civil rights, and his goal of helping make things better in the state he grew up in. He believed he had a higher calling, but instead of the priesthood, he wanted to “participate in righting the wrongs,” especially in the south, through a career in law.
Thomas was one of the first students who participated in an affirmative action admissions program that offered spots to Black students at all-white colleges. He later said that getting spots in this way only hurt the people it was meant to help, because you “had to prove yourself every day because the presumption was that you were dumb and didn’t deserve to be there on merit.”
For years, he had a sour taste in his mouth about Yale. He once wrote, “On the surface, Yale Law School was everything I’d hoped it would be. The students were smart, the environment relaxed but intellectually exciting, yet I still felt out of place. I was among the elite, and I knew that no amount of striving would make me one of them.”
A white admissions officer told a group of Black students, including Thomas, that they weren’t qualified to be there.
After he graduated in 1974, Thomas said a degree from the school meant one thing for Black students and something else for white students. He once wrote that he peeled a 15 cent sticker off another package and put it on his diploma as a reminder of the “mistake I’d made by going to Yale.”
He also blamed Yale for his inability to get a job after graduation. He said his degree was “worthless” in the eyes of white law firm recruiters, who believed he only got it because of affirmative action, not because he deserved it. He wrote, “I was humiliated — and desperate.”
Eventually, Thomas ended up working at the office of Missouri Attorney General John Danforth. This is when his views began to shift to the right. Influenced by prominent Black conservatives like JA Parker (founder of the Black conservative movement) and economists like Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams, Thomas felt that his whole life had proven that “no one was going to take care of me or any other Black person in America.”
He said he’d put in the hours marching, protesting, and asking the government to help Black people, but nothing had changed. It felt pointless. He believed that, essentially, all white people were racist, including the liberals who offered to help.
He wrote, “At least Southerners were up front about their bigotry. You knew exactly where they were coming from, just like the Georgia rattlesnakes that always let you know when they were ready to strike. Not so the paternalistic big-city whites, who offered you a helping hand so long as you were careful to agree with them but slapped you down if you started acting as if you didn’t know your place. Like the water moccasin, they struck without warning.”
He disagreed with programs meant to help Black communities, like welfare or busing children to integrate schools. He learned this from Sowell, and Thomas began to believe that liberal policies, such as job quotas, charities, preferential treatment, and more, tended to “undermine minorities.” But conservative ideas, he said, like “self-reliance, work skills, education, and business experience” had proven successful in helping Black people.
His views were noticed by a Washington Post journalist during a meeting of top Black Republican policymakers in San Francisco. Thomas had paid his own way to the meeting and spoke about the problems of Black education, and the resulting article caught the attention of President Ronald Reagan, who liked Thomas’s conservative views. During his speech, Thomas said Black people needed to get out of Black-only issues and focus on all fields.
Reagan appointed him Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights at the Department of Education, and later to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. As his star power as a conservative rose, George H.W. Bush nominated Thomas to the Supreme Court to replace Thurgood Marshall, who was retiring.
Two days before his 1991 Senate confirmation hearings were set to begin, a woman named Anita Hill came forward, accusing Thomas of sexually harassing her. Hill had worked under Thomas at the Department of Education and the EEOC. She was called to testify in front of Congress, and Thomas’s confirmation was put on hold until the matter was investigated.
Hill accused Thomas of making unwanted advances, sexual comments, and describing pornographic films to her. She said the harassment went on for years, and that she protested, but Thomas pressured her to stay silent.
During the hearings, the 14 Senators on the Senate Judiciary Committee claimed she was lying, while others questioned her sanity. Thomas denied the accusations, and George H.W. Bush stood by his nominee, saying he had “total confidence” in Thomas.
On Oct. 15, 1991, Thomas was confirmed in a 52-48 vote, with 41 Republicans and 11 Democrats voting to confirm him, and 46 Democrats and two Republicans voting against his nomination. He has been on the Supreme Court ever since.
A defining characteristic of Thomas’s time on the court is that he is an originalist, which is to say he believes the meaning of the Constitution is fixed and cannot be changed. He interprets the Constitution based on his perception of the original intent of the framers.
And even though he was silent for the first 10 years, he has been a part of the majority for landmark cases ever since, like Bush v. Gore, Shelby v Holder, the overturning of Roe v. Wade, and Trump’s immunity case. He has suggested overturning other precedents set by the court, such as the right to contraception and same sex marriage.
These decisions were all shaped by his views on originalism, and some people like Thomas because he practices his particular brand of originalism consistently.
Thomas continues to draw controversy. Last year, an investigation by nonprofit news organization ProPublica revealed Thomas had accepted luxury trips from billionaire Harlan Crow for more than two decades. Nearly every year, Thomas took a trip on Crow’s yacht and private jet, and to Crow’s private resort in the Adirondacks. A single trip alone to Indonesia in 2019 is estimated to have cost more than $500,000 if Thomas had footed the bill.
After the investigation came out, Thomas said that he was told he didn’t need to report the travel paid for by his friend. He said he’d been advised by others on the Supreme Court bench that “this sort of personal hospitality from close personal friends, who did not have business before the Court, was not reportable.”
In July, two senators asked the Justice Department to investigate if Thomas broke federal ethics and tax laws, saying Thomas has had plenty of opportunities to explain why he didn’t disclose the gifts to either of these committees, but instead showed a “willful pattern of disregard” for the law.
Now, Thomas speaks up on the court in every hearing. During the pandemic, oral arguments were changed from open, rapid-fire questioning to justices taking turns asking questions one-by-one, starting with Thomas as the most senior justice. When the court first started this format in May 2020, Thomas asked 63 questions in two weeks, 17 of them in one day during a hearing about Donald Trump’s financial records.
As the first justice to ask questions, he’ll often set a theme for other conservative justices, and sometimes even the liberal justices, to jump on within their own questions. For example, during Donald Trump’s immunity case, Thomas asked about the source of the immunity Trump’s legal team claimed Trump had. Justice Sonia Sotomayor went back to that question, quoting Thomas, during her own line of questioning, as did Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.
Thomas is now 76 years old, and is almost certainly considering his future. Retirement becomes far more likely if Trump is reelected, as Thomas would prefer that Trump be able to appoint his successor. He would likely try to stay another four years if Harris is elected in November.
Thomas is one of the court’s most controversial members, and he is likely down to his final handful of years on the court.
Tell me: what questions do you have about Clarence Thomas?