Best Known As: Political Figure

Gist:  Clarence Thomas (born June 23, 1948) is an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, having served since 1991. Justice Thomas is the second African American to serve on the nation's highest court, after Justice Thurgood Marshall, whom he succeeded.

Thomas grew up in Georgia, and graduated from college and law school in New England. In 1974, he was appointed an Assistant Attorney General in Missouri (primarily handling tax matters), and subsequently practiced law there in the private sector. In 1979, he became a legislative assistant to Missouri Senator John Danforth, and in 1981 was appointed as Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Education. The following year, Thomas became Chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, in which position he served for eight years until joining the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in 1990.

Nominated to the Supreme Court by President George H. W. Bush in 1991, Thomas's confirmation hearings were bitter and intensely fought.

Since joining the Court, Thomas has taken an originalist approach to judging, seeking to uphold what he sees as the original meaning of the Constitution and statutes. Moreover, he has often approached federalism issues in a way that limits the federal government's power and expands power of state and local governments, while his opinions have generally supported a strong executive within the federal government.

Life Facts:  Clarence Thomas was born in Pin Point, Georgia, a small, impoverished African American community. His family are descendants of American Slaves in the American South. His father left his family when he was two years old. After a house fire left them homeless, Thomas and his younger brother Myers were taken to Savannah, Georgia, where their mother worked as a domestic employee. Thomas's sister Emma stayed behind with relatives in Pin Point.

When Thomas was 7, the family moved in with his maternal grandfather, Myers Anderson, and Anderson's wife, Christine (née' Hargrove), in Savannah. Anderson had little formal education, but had built a fuel oil business that also sold ice. Thomas calls his grandfather

"the greatest man I have ever known." When Thomas was 10, Anderson started taking the family to help at a farm every day from sunrise to sunset. His grandfather believed in hard work and self-reliance; he would counsel Thomas to "never let the sun catch you in bed."

Mr. Thomas was the only black person at his high school in Savannah, where he was an honors student. Raised Roman Catholic (he later attended an Episcopal church with his wife, but returned to the Catholic Church in the late 1990s). He considered entering the priesthood at the age of 16, becoming the first black student to attend St. John Vianney's Minor Seminary (Savannah) on the Isle of Hope. He also attended Conception Seminary College, a Roman Catholic seminary in Missouri, briefly. No one in Thomas's family had attended college, and Thomas has said that during his first year in seminary he was one of only "three or four" blacks attending the school. Thomas told interviewers that he left the seminary after overhearing a student say, in response to the shooting of Martin Luther King, Jr., "Good, I hope the son of a bitch died." He did not think the church did enough to combat racism.

At a nun's suggestion, Thomas attended the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, where as a sophomore transfer student he had to adjust to a New England atmosphere very different from what he was used to in Savannah. At Holy Cross, Thomas helped found the Black Student Union and once walked out after an incident in which black students were punished while white students were not for committing the same violation. Some of the priests negotiated with the protesting black students to return to school, and Thomas graduated in 1971 with an A.B. cum laude in English literature. Among Thomas's classmates at Holy Cross were future defense attorney Ted Wells and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Edward P. Jones.

Thomas had a series of deferments from the military draft while in college at Holy Cross. Upon graduation, he was classified as 1-A and received a low lottery number, indicating that he might be drafted to serve in Vietnam. But Thomas failed his medical exam, reportedly due to curvature of the spine, and was not drafted.

Thomas has recollected that his Yale law degree was not taken seriously by law firms to which he applied after graduating, and potential employers assumed he obtained it because of affirmative action policies. According to Thomas, he was "asked pointed questions, unsubtly suggesting that they doubted I was as smart as my grades indicated."

Thomas has one child, Jamal Adeen, from his first marriage. This marriage, to college sweetheart Kathy Grace Ambush, lasted from 1971 until their 1981 separation and 1984 divorce. In 1987, Thomas married Virginia Lamp, a lobbyist, aide to Congressman Dick Armey, and subsequently an executive director at the conservative Heritage Foundation. In 1997 they took in one of Thomas' great nephews.

Since joining the Supreme Court, Thomas requested an annulment of his first marriage from the Roman Catholic Church, which was granted. He was reconciled to the Church in the mid-1990s and remains a practicing Catholic, although he criticized the Church in his 2007 autobiography for its approach to racism in the 1960s, saying it was not as "adamant about ending racism then as it is about ending abortion now." Thomas is one of thirteen Catholic justices?out of 110 justices total?in the history of the Supreme Court, and one of six currently on the Court.

In 1994, Thomas performed the wedding ceremony for radio host Rush Limbaugh and his wife, Marta Fitzgerald.

Law professor and former Thomas clerk John Yoo says Justice Thomas supports allowing religious groups more participation in public life. Thomas says the Establishment Clause ("Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion") "is best understood as a federalism provision ?- it protects state establishments from federal interference but does not protect any individual right."

In Elk Grove Unified School District v. Newdow and Cutter v. Wilkinson, Thomas wrote that he supported incorporation of the Free Exercise Clause, which he says "clearly protects an individual right." He said that any law that would violate the Establishment Clause might also violate the Free Exercise Clause.

Thomas says "it makes little sense to incorporate the Establishment Clause" vis-à-vis the states by the Fourteenth Amendment. And in Cutter, he wrote: "The text and history of the Clause may well support the view that the Clause is not incorporated against the States precisely because the Clause shielded state establishments from congressional interference."

Thomas has rarely given media interviews during his time on the Court. He said in 2007: "One of the reasons I don't do media interviews is, in the past, the media often has its own script."

Career Facts:  Toward the end of the confirmation hearings, an FBI interview with Anita Hill was leaked. Hill, an attorney, had worked for Thomas at the Department of Education and the EEOC. After the leak, she was called to testify at Thomas's confirmation hearings, where she alleged that Thomas had subjected her to inappropriate comments of a sexual nature, stopping short of making a legal claim of sexual harassment, saying: "I did not bring the information forward to try to establish a legal claim for sexual harassment." Hill's testimony included lurid details, and she was aggressively questioned by some Senators.

Thomas denied the allegations, stating:

, as wife Virginia Lamp Thomas looks on.]]Hill was the only person to testify at the Senate hearings against Thomas. Angela Wright, who worked with Thomas at the EEOC before he fired her, decided not to testify, but alleged similar improprieties in a written statement, saying that Thomas had repeatedly made sexual comments to her, commenting on her body or pressuring her for dates. Also, Sukari Hardnett, a former Thomas assistant, wrote to the Senate committee saying that although Thomas had not harassed her, "if you were young, black, female, reasonably attractive and worked directly for Clarence Thomas, you knew full well you were being inspected and auditioned as a female."

Other former colleagues testified on Thomas's behalf. Nancy Altman, who shared an office with Thomas at the Department of Education, testified that she "could hear virtually every conversation for two years that Clarence Thomas had ... [and n]ot once in those two years did I ever hear Clarence Thomas make a sexist or offensive comment...." Altman said that it was "not credible that Clarence Thomas could have engaged in the kinds of behavior that Anita Hill alleges, without any of the women who he worked closest with—dozens of us, we could spend days having women come up, his secretaries, his chief of staff, his other assistants, his colleagues—without any of us having sensed, seen or heard something." Senator Alan K. Simpson was puzzled about why Hill and Thomas met, dined, and spoke by phone on various occasions after they no longer worked together.

According to the Oyez Project, there was a lack of convincing proof produced at the Senate hearings. After extensive debate, the Judiciary Committee split 7–7 on September 27, sending the nomination to the full Senate without a recommendation. Thomas was confirmed by a 52–48 vote on October 15, 1991, the narrowest margin for approval in more than a century. The final floor vote was mostly along party lines: 41 Republicans and 11 Democrats voted to confirm while 46 Democrats and two Republicans voted to reject the nomination.

The debate over who was telling the truth continues, and several books have been written about the original hearings and testimony that could have been presented. Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill have both written autobiographies that include their takes on the hearings. The conduct, meaning, and outcome of the hearings are still vigorously disputed by all sides.