onated congressmen to ever serve on Congress. But, luckily he is also one of the most brilliant congressmen to ever
serve on Congress. In this biography hopefully the reader will leave feeling satisfied that
I have provided satisfactory documentation to back up these two “bold” statements. It is
the opinion of many that Clarence Thomas is just a horny, selfish and “typical”
congressman. I feel that it is up to me to justify why this man’s name should be spoken
in the same breath as other “firsts” on Congress, such as Thurgood Marshal and Shirley
Chisholm.
Clarence Thomas was born on June 23, 1948 in Pin Point, Georgia. Clarence is
the oldest boy born to M.C. and Leola Thomas. He has an older sister named Emma
Mae, and a younger brother, Myers. Clarence had a rough childhood, at the age of 2 his
father left his mother while she was pregnant with their third child. At the age of seven
Clarence and younger brother Myers were forced to move in with their grandparents,
Christine and Myers Anderson, because their house burned down. In a June 1987 speech
to the Heritage Foundation Thomas recalled, “My householdwas strong, stable, and
conservative.” In his household, God was central. School, discipline, hard work, and
knowing right from wrong were of the highest priority. Crime welfare, slothfulness, and
alcohol were enemies. This strict upbringing proved beneficial to Clarence as far as his
schoolwork was concerned, but as far as religion and moral issues are concerned maybe
he tried to tune his grandparents out.
After high school Thomas was going to enter the priesthood through the
Immaculate Conception Seminary in Conception, Missouri.Thomas later on decided to
leave the Seminary in 1968 due to racial issues. Also during 1968 he transferred to Holy
Cross, a Jesuit college in Worcester, Massachusetts. At Holy Cross, along with others he
formed the Black Student Union. Thomas graduated from Holy Cross cum laude-ninth
in his class-from Holy Cross in 1971 with an A.B. degree in English literature. In
September 1971 Thomas entered Yale Law School which had recently adopted an
affirmative action program of aggressively recruiting minorities. In a 1983 speech
Thomas was quoted as saying in a speech to Equal Employment Opportunity
Commission staffers, he said, “But for affirmative action, God only knows where I would
be today. These laws and their proper application are all that stand between the first
seventeen years of my life and the second seventeen years. But on the other hand, Juan
Williams quoted him as saying, “I don’t think black people are indebted to anybody for
anything. Nobody has done us any favors in this country, buddy. This thing about how
they let me into Yale-that kind of stuff offends me. All they did was stop stopping us.
Thomas and most of his associates have told interviewers that affirmative action for
economically disadvantaged people might be justified in certain circumstances but that
race-based policies end up benefiting mainly middle-class blacks and do little to alleviate
the poverty of the majority.
Thomas began his career as a politician as a Democrat working for George S.
McGovern’s campaign team in the 1972 election. For reasons that have yet to be found
Thomas then switched over to being a Republican within the next four years. Thomas
told Howard Kurt from the Washington Post that, “The Democratic party just did not
level with me.” “They continued to promise some kind of salvation for minorities, talked
down about poverty programs, always enshrouded everything in civil rights.” In
contrast,himself, when extreme black conservative Thomas Sowell wrote a book, Thomas
felt like the book was “manna from heaven”. In 1977 Thomas joined the Saint Louis
based Monsato Company in as a staff attuorney dealing with pesticide, fungicide, and
rodenticide law. Then two years later in 1979, he went to Washington, D.C., to work for
John C. Danforth who was on the United States senate. In December 1980 Thomas
Sowell invited Thomas to speak at the Fairmont conference, which was a meeting of 100
black conservatives. In 1981 Thomas joined the Reagan administrationas an assistant
secretaryfor civil rights in the Department of Education, but he resented in being placed
in an area where they primarily dealt with black issues. After spending only eight months
in the Department of Education he was nominated in 1982 to chair the EEOC. The
EEOC was created in 1964 by the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The EEOC investigates
accusations of job discrimination on the basis of race, sex, color, religion, or national
origin and with reaching settlements with employers where appropriate. Thomas worked
in the EEOC for eight years, from May 1982 to March 1990, and he has been widely
questioned as to how he handled certain issues while in office. Robert Pear who works
for the New York Times stated that, “the agency was to blame for turning back the clock
on civil rights progress on several fronts.” In 1982 Thomas fought to get a tax-exempt
status for Bob Jones University, a religious school that banned interracial dating and
marriage among its students. Then in 1983 the EEOC got a landmark case where they set
numerical hiring, training, and promotion goals for blacks, Hispanics, and women.