Clarence Thomas
Clarence Thomas (J.D., Yale Law School, 1974; A.B. English literature, College of the Holy Cross (Worcester, Massachusetts), 1971) is an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, having served since 1991; since the retirement of Justice Anthony Kennedy, Thomas has been the senior-most Associate Justice on the Court. 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.
“Good manners will open doors that the best education cannot. ”
“I could tell...that my friends were doing their best to get across the message that I wasn't Frankenstein's monster but a perfectly normal human being. What they didn't understand was that my opponents didn't care who I was. Even if they had wanted to know the truth about me, it would have made no sense to them, since I refused to stay in my place and play by their rules and was too complicated to fit into their simple-minded, stereotypical pigeonholes. In any case, I couldn't be defeated without first being caricatured and dehumanized...[T]hey couldn't allow my life to be seen as the story of an ordinary person who, like most people, had worked out his problems step by unsure step. That would have been too honest-and too human.”
“Merely because I was black, it seemed, I was supposed to listen to Hugh Maskela instead of Carole King, just as I was expected to be a radical, not a conservative. I no longer cared to play that game ... The black people I knew came from different places and backgrounds - social, economic, even ethnic - yet the color of our skin was somehow supposed to make us identical in spite of our differences. I didn't buy it. Of course we had all experienced racism in one way or another, but that did not mean we had to think alike”