Clarence Thomas

Clarence Thomas (born June 23, 1948) is an American lawyer and jurist who has served since 1991 as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. President George H. W. Bush nominated him to succeed Thurgood Marshall. After Marshall, Thomas is the second African American to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court and has been its longest-serving member since Anthony Kennedy's retirement in 2018. He has also been the Court's oldest member since Stephen Breyer retired in 2022.

Thomas was born in Pin Point, Georgia. After his father abandoned the family, he was raised by his grandfather in a poor Gullah community near Savannah, Georgia. Growing up as a devout Catholic, Thomas originally intended to be a priest in the Catholic Church but became dissatisfied with its efforts to combat racism and abandoned his aspiration to join the clergy. He graduated with honors from the College of the Holy Cross in 1971 and earned his Juris Doctor in 1974 from Yale Law School. Upon graduating, he was appointed as an assistant attorney general in Missouri and later entered private practice there. He became a legislative assistant to U.S. Senator John Danforth in 1979, and was made Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Education in 1981. President Ronald Reagan appointed Thomas as Chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) the next year.

President George H. W. Bush nominated Thomas to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in 1990. He served in that role for 19 months before filling Marshall's seat on the Supreme Court. Thomas's confirmation hearings were bitter and intensely fought, centering on an accusation that he had sexually harassed Anita Hill, a subordinate at the Department of Education and the EEOC. The Senate confirmed Thomas by a vote of 52–48, the narrowest margin in a century.

Since the death of Antonin Scalia, Thomas has been the Court's foremost originalist, stressing what he considers the original meaning in interpreting the U.S. Constitution. In contrast to Scalia—who had been the only other consistent originalist—he pursues a more classically liberal variety of originalism. Until 2020, Thomas was known for his silence during most oral arguments, though he has since begun asking more questions to counsel. He is notable for his majority opinions in Good News Club v. Milford Central School (determining the freedom of religious speech in relation to the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution) and New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen (affirming the individual right to bear arms outside the home), as well as his dissent in Gonzales v. Raich (arguing that the U.S. Congress may not criminalize the private cultivation of medical cannabis). He is widely considered to be the Court's most conservative member.

Thomas was born on June 23, 1948, in his parents' wooden shack in Pin Point, Georgia. Pin Point was a small community near Savannah founded by freedmen in the 1880s. He was the second of three children of M.C. Thomas, a farm worker, and Leola Williams. Williams had been born out of wedlock; after her mother's death, she was sent from Liberty County, Georgia, to live with an aunt in Pin Point. The family were descendants of enslaved people and spoke the creole language Gullah as a first language. Thomas's earliest known ancestors were slaves named Sandy and Peggy, who were born in the late 18th century and owned by wealthy planter Josiah Wilson of Liberty County. Thomas's older sister, Emma, was born in 1946, and his younger brother, Myers, in 1949.

Upon becoming pregnant with Thomas's older sister, Leola was expelled from her Baptist church and dropped out of high school after the 10th grade; her father ordered her to marry M.C. in January 1947. After three years of marriage, M.C. sued for divorce, claiming that Leola neglected the children, and a judge granted the request in March 1951. After the divorce, M.C. moved to Savannah and later Pennsylvania, visiting his children only once. Leola went to work as a maid in Savannah during the week and returned to Pin Point on the weekends. Custody of the children was awarded to Leola's aunt.

When her aunt's house burned down in 1955, Leola took her children to live with her in the room she rented in a tenement with an outdoor toilet in Savannah, leaving her daughter with the aunt in Pin Point. She asked her father, Myers Anderson, for help. He initially refused but agreed after his wife threatened to throw him out. Thomas and his brother went to live with Anderson, his maternal grandfather, in 1955 and experienced amenities such as indoor plumbing and regular meals for the first time.

Despite having little formal education, Anderson had built a successful business delivering coal, oil, and ice. When racial unrest led to widespread protest and marches in Savannah from 1960 to 1963, Anderson used his wealth to bail out demonstrators and took his grandchildren to meetings promoted by the NAACP. Thomas has described his grandfather as the person who has influenced his life the most.