TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/071591/0715100.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 13.9 KB | 281 lines

                                                                                NATION, Page 18

THE SUPREME COURT

Marching to a Different Drummer


By choosing Clarence Thomas, who says integration is an impossible
dream, Bush sparks a debate over the goals of the civil rights
movement

By MARGARET CARLSON -- Reported by Joseph J. Kane/Savannah and
Staci D. Kramer/St. Louis, with other bureaus


    In the days after George Bush interrupted his Kennebunkport
vacation to announce his replacement for Justice Thurgood
Marshall, the tiniest details of Clarence Thomas' background
began to tumble out. They ranged from the lack of indoor plumbing
in the house where he was born to the cigars he smokes to the
bitter divorce from his first wife.

    Thomas, 43, is a bundle of seeming contradictions: a black
conservative who made it out of dirt-poor rural Georgia to Yale
Law School and the highest ranks of government yet is opposed
to all racial preferences; a founding member of the Black
Student Union at Holy Cross and a Black Panther sympathizer
dressed in beret and combat boots who became the darling of
right-wing Republicans; a lawyer who once called the Supreme
Court's overthrow of segregation in Brown v. Board of Education
"one of the most significant cases decided by the court during
this century,'' but later criticized the ruling on the ground
that it was based on the faulty assumption that any all-black
school was automatically inferior to an integrated one. Thomas
has gone from being a Baptist to a Catholic seminarian to
attending an Episcopalian church, from having a black wife to
a white one. He has built his career in part on an intellectual
rejection of government attempts to redress racial prejudice
while benefiting from similar efforts.

    To some, Thomas' nomination looks cynical, a way for the
Bush Administration to appoint a black whom civil rights groups
and liberal Democrats would look churlish opposing while at the
same time sticking to its efforts to pull back on civil rights
programs. Jim Cicconi, a former senior official in the
Administration who handled civil rights issues, explains the
bind Thomas' critics are in: "It's going to be difficult for
liberals on the Senate Judiciary Committee to go after Clarence
Thomas for not being sufficiently sensitive to the interests of
blacks and the disadvantaged, since he has been both and most
of them have been neither." If the Senate were to reject Thomas,
footage of liberal Democrats berating him for his opposition to
quotas would undoubtedly play a role in Bush's re-election
campaign.

    In his writings and speeches Thomas has described his
inner conflicts, calling himself a child of hatred and love, of
malign neglect and compensating family attention, of painful
encounters with white racism and the healing guidance of an
order of Irish Catholic nuns. The President could hardly have
picked a nominee whose early life better demonstrates self-help,
Horatio Alger and Booker T. Washington combined in one man's
struggle.

    Thomas was born with the help of a midwife in 1948 in a
wooden house close to the marshes in Pin Point, Ga., a
segregated enclave without paved streets or sewers. His mother
Leola Williams, only 18 when he was born, already had an infant
daughter. When Thomas was two, his father walked out on the
family, heading to Philadelphia in search of a better life.
Pregnant with a third child, Thomas' mother lived in a
dirt-floor one-room shack that belonged to an aunt and went to
work at the factory next door, picking crabmeat for 5 cents per
lb. The children wore hand-me-down clothes from the Sweet Fields
of Eden Baptist Church and often went without shoes.

    When Thomas was seven, the house burned to the ground and
the family moved to Savannah; Leola and her daughter lived with
an aunt while the two boys were sent to the well-tended home of
their grandfather Myers Anderson. For the first time Thomas
lived in a house with indoor plumbing. Anderson, who made a
decent living selling ice and coal from the back of a pickup
truck, could barely read but was a strong believer in
education. He enrolled Thomas in a nearby school staffed by what
white Catholics called "nigger nuns." They rode in the back of
the bus with their students on field trips and rapped the palms
of the children who did not hand in homework. Thomas'
grandfather took him to meetings of the local chapter of the
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People,
where he read his grandson's grades out loud.

    Thomas' rigorous Catholic education continued at St. John
Vianney Minor Seminary in Savannah, where he was the only black
in the 1967 graduating class, and for a year at Immaculate
Conception Seminary in Conception, Mo. Remembering his childhood
as he spoke to reporters in Kennebunkport, Thomas choked up so
much that he could barely get through the remarks scrawled in
ink on a sheet of loose-leaf paper. "I thank all of those who
have helped me along the way . . . especially my grandparents,
my mother and the nuns, all of whom were adamant that I grow up
to make something of myself."

    To fill the seat of one of the greatest civil rights
heroes, Bush found a black who actually believes in the
Republican notion that minorities need the absence of
discrimination, not affirmative action, in order to succeed.
Thomas has pitched his political tent on a small plot of ground
where black nationalism and Republican conservatism converge.

    Thomas once said that civil rights leaders just "bitch,
bitch, bitch, moan and whine." Years ago, he did complain
publicly about discrimination, over an incident at the seminary
in Missouri. Thomas told a friend, Jerry Hunter, now general
counsel of the National Labor Relations Board, that he was
walking past a room when a television news flash proclaimed that
Martin Luther King Jr. had been shot. He heard a white student
say something like, "It's about time you got the s.o.b." That
day, Thomas told another friend, he decided that he would not
stay at a school that didn't practice what it preached. Friends
recall other racial slights: a note from a white classmate in
his high school yearbook, "Keep on trying, Clarence. One day you
will be as good as us." He was also ridiculed for his dark
complexion. Once a student yelled to him after lights out,
"Smile, Clarence, so we can see you."

    At Yale Law School, Thomas sat in the back of classes and
tried to hide his face in the hope that his professors would not
notice his race. He wanted no special treatment even though he
had been admitted under the school's affirmative-action policy.
The program called for aggressive recruitment of minority
students but it did not set quotas for their admission.

    Bush was inclined from the start to choose an African
American. Right after the 1988 election, the Bush team
speculated that he might get to fill as many as three or four
openings on the court. They latched onto the idea of enhancing
the diversity of the court, appointing the first Hispanic and
Asian American, naming more women and filling Marshall's seat
with a black -- a curious approach for an Administration so
vocally opposed to quotas. Emilio Garza, a federal judge from
Texas, was brought to the Justice Department on Saturday for an
interview, but he was quickly dismissed.

    On Sunday afternoon, Thomas was invited to fly to
Kennebunkport next day to meet Bush. When he arrived there, the
house was so full of aides and family members gathered to
celebrate Bush's mother's 90th birthday that Bush had to pull
Thomas into the master bedroom behind the horseshoe pit so they
could talk privately. Aides do not know if Bush posed the
Eagleton-inspired question, "Is there anything I should know,"
but he did extract a promise that Thomas would stick out the
confirmation process no matter how tough it got. When they
emerged from the room for a lunch of crabmeat salad, Thomas was
the nominee.

    Thomas may agree with Republican conservatives on racial
issues, but he arrived at those conclusions by a different
route. His rejection of affirmative action is largely based on
his feeling that whites will never be fair to blacks, a view
long espoused by black nationalists like Marcus Garvey. Thomas
is skeptical about integration as a goal because he doubts that
it is attainable. Racial preferences, he says, sap the
determination of African Americans and lead whites to believe
that blacks advance mainly as a result of reverse
discrimination. He would much rather see blacks pour their
energies into building their own schools, but he sent his son
Jamal to a racially mixed private school.

    Thomas argues that no other group has been pulled into the
mainstream economy by government programs. He resents the
government's "experimentation on our race," which he says puts
blacks in the position of having to account for every break they
get. When Thomas was sworn in for a second term as chairman of
the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Assistant Attorney
General for Civil Rights William Bradford Reynolds delivered the
toast, "It's a proud moment for me to stand here, because
Clarence Thomas is the epitome of the right kind of affirmative
action working the right way." Thomas flinched. He is
determined that there be no doubt that his appointment to the
bench came about because of his own intelligence and hard work.

    As Supreme Court nominees go, Thomas has little judicial
experience. He is not a brilliant legal scholar, a weighty
thinker or even the author of numerous opinions. As a lawyer in
Missouri Attorney General John Danforth's office in 1974, he
worked on corporate issues, intentionally avoiding areas like
civil rights and abortion. As a lawyer at the Monsanto Co. from
1977 to 1979, Thomas shepherded pesticides through government
registration. He returned to Danforth's staff as a legislative
assistant in 1979, and in 1981 served briefly and quietly at the
Department of Education's civil rights division.

    It is Thomas' record as chairman of the EEOC starting in
1982 that troubles liberals most. Juan Williams, a journalist
who conducted a series of interviews with Thomas over five
years, wrote in the Atlantic in 1987 that Thomas was a "sad,
lonely, troubled, and deeply pessimistic public servant." As the
second highest ranking black in the Reagan Administration,
Thomas was earning $71,000 a year, moving about in a chauffeured
government car (which stopped most mornings at a Catholic church
so Thomas could pray alone for a few minutes). Beside his desk
he kept a flag bearing the motto "Don't Tread on Me."

    Early in Reagan's first term, Thomas battled with Reynolds
over the Justice Department's go-slow approach to civil rights
cases. But at the EEOC, Thomas angered civil rights
organizations by shifting the agency away from class-action
cases to focus on specific acts of discrimination. He rejected
the use of statistics on the number of minorities hired by an
employer to prove discrimination. Thomas once asked a
congressional committee whether anyone would ever suggest that
Georgetown University was discriminating against white
basketball players because its team was all black.

    In 1990 Bush named him to a federal appeals court in
Washington, which has often been a spawning ground for Supreme
Court Justices, but Thomas has only ruled in 27 routine cases.

    Though civil rights groups are understandably cautious
about attacking a black, Thomas' appointment could spark a
debate among African Americans about the best means for their
race to progress. Though most blacks harbor an instinctive
mistrust of anyone who worked with Ronald Reagan, not all of
Thomas' views are as far from the black mainstream as some civil
rights spokesmen would have it. For example, a growing number
of black parents now send their children to historically black
colleges in the belief that such institutions do a better job
of nurturing young blacks' self-confidence.

    Thomas' strong antiabortion views are another matter. As
a Senate Democratic aide puts it, "If you were a committee
liberal, would you rather oppose a sharecropper's son on the
issue of civil rights or on the issue of abortion rights?"
Unlike David Souter, who escaped scrutiny on abortion, Thomas
has a paper trail. Abortion-rights advocates have seized upon
a 1987 speech in which Thomas praised an article in the American
Spectator that called for the constitutional protection of the
"inalienable right to life of the child-about-to-be-born."

    There are a few wild cards in the confirmation process. No
one knows how Thomas will come across on television, although
his private tale of triumph over high odds is likely to win
better ratings than daytime soap operas. Thomas also has a
respected political godfather in Danforth, who has an
unblemished civil rights record and has been trying to persuade
the Administration to accept a compromise version of the current
civil rights bill.

    Occupants of the row of seats reserved for family and
friends when the Judiciary Committee begins Thomas' confirmation
hearings this September could constitute a new American Gothic
-- doting nuns in their 70s; a mother who works as a
receptionist and nurse's aide at a hospital; the father who has
rarely been seen since he abandoned the family; a sister, whom
Thomas once criticized for relying on welfare and who now works
as a cook at a hospital; his second wife, Virginia Lamp Thomas,
of the Labor Department, who made her reputation in Washington
fighting against comparable-worth legislation that would have
required equal pay for women. There may be an empty symbolic
seat for Myers Anderson, who died eight years ago. Thomas once
thought his grandfather had "too high expectations." But
Anderson may have been the only person who could imagine how
high his grandson would climb.