Excerpts From Clarence Thomas’ New Book

Excerpts from My Grandfather’s Son:

Justice Clarence Thomas applies childhood lessons about race to his 1991 Supreme Court confirmation hearings, in which Anita Hill accused him of sexual harassment: “As a child I had been warned by (grandfather) that I could be picked up off the streets of Savannah and hauled off to jail or the chain gang for no reason other than that I was black … [W]e never forgot what it felt like to live in fear of the power of a mob. The mob I now faced carried no ropes or guns. Its weapons were smooth-tongued lies spoken into microphones and printed on the front pages of America’s newspapers …But it was a mob all the same, and its purpose — to keep the black man in his place — was unchanged.”

Thomas says he believes that his political opponents, including liberal activist groups, wanted to keep him off the bench partly because they feared he would vote to overturn abortion rights. During the hearings, Thomas testified that he had never discussed the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling and declined to state his view on abortion. He writes that he voted in 1992, a year after his confirmation, to overturn Roe. “By then I’d had ample time to study Roe in detail, and concluded that it was wrongly decided and should now be overruled.

As a justice, Thomas has ruled against affirmative action, and he clearly felt stigmatized by it, particularly as a law student at Yale. After he had been on the Supreme Court for five years, he asked former White House counsel Boyden Gray if he had been chosen because he was black: “Boyden replied that in fact my race had actually worked against me. The initial plan, he said, had been to have me replace Justice (William) Brennan in order to avoid appointing me to what was widely perceived as the court’s ‘black’ seat, thus making the confirmation even more contentious. But Justice Brennan retired earlier than expected (in 1990), and everyone in the White House agreed that I needed more time (on an appeals court) in order to pass muster as a Supreme Court nominee.”

Source: USA Today