Thomas, Clarence (1948-…), became an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States in 1991. He was the second African American to serve on the court. Thurgood Marshall had been the first. President George H. W. Bush nominated Thomas to fill the vacancy created by Marshall’s retirement.
As a Supreme Court justice, Thomas’s judgments on key issues, including civil rights matters, have been conservative. His views contrast sharply with those of Marshall, who was considered a liberal.
Thomas was born on June 23, 1948, in Pin Point, Georgia. He graduated from the College of the Holy Cross in 1971 and received a law degree from Yale Law School in 1974. He served as an assistant attorney general for the state of Missouri from 1974 to 1977. He then held a series of other government and legal positions, including that of secretary for civil rights in the United States Department of Education in 1981 and 1982.
In May 1982, Thomas became chairman of the United States Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). As chairman of the EEOC, Thomas generated controversy by his outspoken opposition to affirmative-action programs, which are designed to remedy the effects of past discrimination against such groups as women and minorities. In 1990, Bush appointed Thomas to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.
In 1991, during U.S. Senate hearings to confirm Thomas’s nomination to the Supreme Court, many senators accused Thomas of trying to downplay his conservative views. The confirmation process became one of the bitterest in history after Anita F. Hill, a law professor at the University of Oklahoma, accused Thomas of having sexually harassed her when he was her supervisor at the Department of Education and at the EEOC. Thomas denied the charges. Following days of televised hearings, the Senate voted to confirm Thomas by the narrow margin of 52 to 48. In 2007, Thomas’s memoir, My Grandfather’s Son, was published.
