In 1969, a 21-year-old black kid from the swamps of Georgia was walking around a Massachusetts college campus and combat boots, army fatingsues, and a Black Panther beret. He had a poster of Malcolm X on his dorm room wall at the College of the Holy Cross. He could quote Malcolm’s speeches from memory. He helped found the Black Student Union, ran free breakfast programs for children, and organized walkouts against the Vietnam War.
His classmate, Gordon Davis, later described him to PBS Frontline. He dressed like them, he talked like them, he had a beret, he had army fatigues, and he had the Army boots. That same man now sits on the United States Supreme Court in Washington, DC. And from that bench, he voted to gut the Voting Rights Act. He voted to kill Affirmative Action, the exact policy that got him into college.
He voted to overturn Row versus Wade. And he did all of it while a Texas billionaire was buying his mother’s house in Savannah, paying his nephew’s private school tuition, and flying him around the world on a 162 ft super yacht. So, how does someone go from quoting Malcolm X in a college dorm to dismantling the Voting Rights Act from the Supreme Court? How does someone climb every rung of the Civil Rights Ladder and then rip it apart behind him? This is the story of Clarence Thomas.
Pinpoint, Georgia, a tiny settlement on the coastal marshes southeast of Savannah. Founded in the 1880s by freed slaves from the nearby islands, the men caught crabs and rad oysters. The women shucked them in a small cinder block factory by the water. The houses were wooden shacks lit by kerosene lamps. There was no indoor plumbing.
Clarence Thomas was born there on June 23rd, 1948. His mother, Leola Williams, was 18. His father, MC Thomas, left the family when Clarence was 2 years old and never came back. Clarence grew up speaking Gulla, a creole language passed down from enslaved West Africans along the Georgia and South Carolina coast.
He later said the Gulla was part of why he rarely spoke from the bench. He had been mocked for the way he talked his entire childhood. His older sister, Emma, stayed with a relative. Clarence and his younger brother, Meyers, everybody called him Peanut, lived with their mother in a house with no plumbing and dirt floors.
Leola worked as a housekeeper for $10 a week. She refused to go on welfare. Then in 1955, when Clarence was seven, his brother and her cousin were playing with matches and burned the house to the ground. Leola moved the family into a tenement apartment in Savannah. One faucet, a cracked outdoor toilet, a lenolium kitchen floor laid directly on the dirt.
Thomas later called it moving from the comparative safety of rural poverty to the foulest kind of urban squalor. After a few months of watching her sons go hungry, Leola made the decision that would shape the rest of Clarence Thomas’ life. She sent both boys down the street to live with her father, Meyers Anderson, on East 32nd Street in Savannah.
Myers Anderson was a different kind of man, barely literate, but he had built his own fuel oil delivery business from scratch. Wood, ice, coal, then heating oil. The business never grossed more than $7,000 a year, but Anderson owned his property outright. He and his wife Christine had built their house themselves for $600.
It had hardwood floors, a refrigerator stocked with milk and soda, and indoor plumbing. After the shack and pinpoint, it felt like a different world. Anderson was a devout Catholic, a registered Democrat, and a duespaying NAACP member. His best friend, WW Law, ran the Savannah NAACP chapter.
Between 1960 and 1963, Anderson used his own property to post bail for civil rights demonstrators who had been arrested. He took his grandsons to NACP meetings and read their report cards aloud in front of the other members. But the man was hard. He removed the heater from his delivery truck because he thought comfort would make the boys lazy.
He made them work his farm in Liberty County where they built a four room cinder block house by hand. He told them rights come from God, not from any government. And his favorite saying, the one Clarence Thomas would carry for the rest of his life, was old man K is dead. I help bury him. That phrase is now inscribed on a bust of Meyers Anderson that sits inside Clarence Thomas’s Supreme Court chambers in Washington.
The question is whether Anderson would recognize what his grandson did with the values he gave him. Anderson wanted Clarence to become a priest, the first black priest in Savannah. He enrolled him at St. John Vion Minor Seminary, an all-white Catholic boarding school on the aisle of hope in Savannah.
Thomas was the only black student in his class. Anderson’s parting instruction, according to a CBS 60 Minutes interview, was, “Boy, don’t you shame me and don’t you shame your race.” Thomas was a strong student, top grades, praised for his devotion. People were already saying he would make history, but at night in the barracks, he could hear the other students chanting racial slurs through the walls.
He transferred to Conception Seminary College in Missouri. The racism followed him. Then on April 4th, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee. The news reached the seminary that evening and a white seminarian sitting near Clarence said out loud, “Good. I hope the son of a dies.” In his memoir, My grandfather’s son, Thomas wrote that the same student added something even worse, a racial slur so vile that Thomas said it ended his faith, his vocation, and for all practical purposes, his Catholic identity.
Thomas left the seminary. He went home to Savannah and told his grandfather he was done with the priesthood. Anderson kicked him out of the house. “I’m finished helping you,” Anderson told him. “You’ll have to figure it out yourself. You’ll probably end up like your no good daddy or those other no good pinpoint negroes.
” But a Catholic connection secured him a scholarship to the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts. The school’s president, Father John E. Brooks, was personally recruiting black students from up and down the East Coast. He called the program affirmative action. When Thomas arrived in the fall of 1968, there were fewer than 30 black students on a campus of over 2,000.
And this is where Clarence Thomas became someone that the Clarence Thomas of 2026 would vote against. He helped found the Black Student Union at Holy Cross. He organized walkouts to protest the treatment of black athletes. He ran free breakfast and free clothing drives modeled directly on the Black Panther Party.
He joined the April 1969 Harvard Square riot against the Vietnam War. His classmates elected him president of the Black Student Union, though he turned it down, saying the man who had actually led them through the walkout deserved the position. He graduated laad in 1971 with an English degree. He married his first wife, Kathy Ambush, the day after commencement.
Then he applied to Yale Law School in New Haven, Connecticut, and he got in through Yale’s new affirmative action admissions program. If that program had not existed, Clarence Thomas does not become a lawyer. He does not get appointed to the EEOC. He does not get nominated to the Supreme Court. Everything that followed depended on a door that affirmative action held open.
Pay attention to that because it explains everything that comes next. Something changed at Yale Law School. Thomas walked in as a radical. He walked out as something else entirely. He later said that Yale humiliated him. That classmates and professors assumed he was only there because of his race. That when he interviewed with major law firms in his third year, nobody took him seriously.
He said his Yale degree was worth 15 cents because it carried the taint of racial preference. He peeled a 15 cent sticker off a package of cigars, stuck it on his diploma frame, and stored the degree in his basement. His only serious job offer came from John Danforth, the Republican attorney general of Missouri. Thomas worked at the state attorney general’s office in Jefferson City from 1974 to 1977 handling state tax cases.
Then he spent two years as a corporate lawyer at the Monsanto Chemical Company. Somewhere in this stretch he read Race and Economics by the black economist Thomas Saul. He later wrote that he drank his words like a man dying of thirst. Saw’s argument was that government programs designed to help black people actually hurt them by creating dependency.
That the welfare system had done more damage to black families than segregation ever did. Thomas took that idea and built an entire worldview around it. When Ronald Reagan took office in 1981, his administration went looking for black conservatives. They could put invisible positions inside the federal government, people who could provide cover for policies that were rolling back civil rights protections.
Thomas fit the profile. Reagan appointed him assistant secretary for civil rights at the Department of Education in Washington. He was 32 years old. Within a year, they promoted him to chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. The EEOC, the federal agency that investigates discrimination complaints, files lawsuits against employers, and protects workers who have been fired or harassed because of their race, gender, age, or disability.
The Reagan administration put a man who opposed affirmative action in charge of the agency that enforced it. And Thomas delivered exactly what they wanted. He shifted the EEOC away from class action lawsuits. Class actions had been the AY’s sharpest weapon for decades. You could take on an entire company for a pattern of workplace discrimination and force systemic change.
Thomas replaced that approach with individual complaints, one case at a time, one person at a time, which made it nearly impossible to prove that discrimination was happening on a companywide scale. He refused to enforce hiring programs that set numerical goals for minority recruitment. These programs had been the reason black workers got a foothold in industries that had shut them out for generations.
Thomas let them expire. And then there was the age discrimination scandal. Under Thomas’s watch, the EEOC let approximately 13,000 age discrimination cases sit in filing cabinets until the statute of limitations ran out. The claims were never investigated. The paperwork just sat there until the legal window closed. Congress had to pass the Age Discrimination Claims Assistance Act of 1988 just to reopen a 540day window so those workers could refile the claims his agency had let die.
He served as EEOC chairman for 8 years, the longest tenure in the AY’s history. By the time he left the EEOC offices in Washington in March of 1990, the civil rights enforcement machine had been hollowed out from the inside. The people who put him there were already planning what came next. On June 27th, 1991, Justice Thood Marshall announced his retirement from the United States Supreme Court.
Marshall was a giant of American law. He had argued Brown versus Board of Education before the Supreme Court in 1954. He had spent his career dismantling legal segregation across the country. He was the first black man to ever sit on the nation’s highest court and now his chair was empty. 4 days later, President George HW Bush nominated Clarence Thomas to fill it.
He called Thomas the best qualified at this time. Thomas had been a federal judge for less than 19 months. He had no major published opinions. The American Bar Association gave him a qualified rating, the lowest passing grade. But Bush needed a black conservative to replace a black liberal. Thomas was the play.
The confirmation hearings in the United States Senate started in September. Thomas refused to take clear positions on abortion, privacy, or constitutional interpretation. He told the Senate Judiciary Committee he had never discussed Ro versus Wade, which almost nobody believed. The committee vote split 7 to7 and they sent his nomination to the full Senate without a recommendation.
Then a name entered the story that changed everything. Anita Hill was a law professor at the University of Oklahoma. She had worked under Clarence Thomas at the Department of Education and then at the EEOC offices in Washington. She was a Yale law graduate. She was black and after her confidential statement to the FBI was leaked to the press on October 6th, the Senate reopened the hearings.
On October 11th, 1991, Hill testified under oath before the Senate Judiciary Committee. 14 white male senators sat before her. There was not a single woman on the committee. Only two women served in the entire 100 member United States Senate. At the time, she described Clarence Thomas repeatedly pressuring her for dates at the EEOC.
She described them talking about pornography in their workplace, naming a pornographic film actor. In her sworn testimony, she told the committee that Thomas once picked up a can of Coke in his office, looked at it, and asked who had put pubic hair on his coke. She described him referencing the size of his own anatomy, and discussing acts he had seen in pornographic films.
That evening, Thomas appeared before the committee and denied everything. Then he delivered a line that landed like a bomb inside the Senate hearing room. He called it a circus, a national disgrace. And from his standpoint as a black American, he said it was a high techch lynching for uppidity blacks who in any way dain to think for themselves, to do for themselves, to have different ideas.
He said it was a message that unless you cowtow to an old order, you will be lynched, destroyed, caricatured by a committee of the United States Senate rather than hung from a tree. That phrase reframed the entire debate inside the Senate chamber. Suddenly, it was no longer about what he did to Anita Hill.
It was about what the Senate was doing to him. On October 15th, 1991, the Senate confirmed Thomas by a vote of 52- 48. 41 Republicans and 11 Democrats voted yes. 46 Democrats and two Republicans, Jim Jeffs of Vermont and Bob Pacwood of Oregon, voted no. It was the narrowest Supreme Court confirmation in over a century, and it remains the closest confirmation by a Senate controlled by the opposite party of the nominating president.
Thomas was sworn in 8 days later at 43 years old. If you want to subscribe, and you have not yet, now would be a good time. This story is about to get much heavier. For his first decade on the Supreme Court bench, Clarence Thomas was known mostly for silence. He asked his last question during oral arguments on February 22nd, 2006.
He did not ask another one until February 29th, 2016. 10 years of silence, the longest stretch from any justice in modern Supreme Court history. His critics called him disengaged. His supporters called him strategic. Justice Antinine Scalia called him a colleague who does not believe in stair decisis period.
Meaning Thomas had no loyalty to previous Supreme Court decisions, even landmark ones. Then the court shifted and Thomas’ votes started hitting different. In 2013, the Supreme Court heard Shelby County versus Holder. The case challenged section 4 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the formula that determined which states with a history of racial voter suppression had to get federal approval before changing their voting laws.
The Voting Rights Act, the single most important piece of civil rights legislation in American history, the law that let black communities in places like Savannah, Georgia, Clarence Thomas’s own backyard, vote without being blocked by literacy tests, pole taxes, and rigged registration systems. Thomas did not just vote with the majority to gut it.
He wrote a separate concurrence arguing that section 5 itself, the entire pre-clarance requirement, should be struck down completely. Within hours, Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott announced that the state’s strict voter identification law, which had been blocked under the Voting Rights Act just the year before, would take effect immediately.
Mississippi followed the same day. Over the next decade, 15 states passed new laws restricting voter registration, early voting, and Sunday voting according to the NAACP legal defense fund. Thomas voted to make all of that possible from Thood Marshall’s chair. Then came June 29th, 2023. The Supreme Court struck down affirmative action in college admissions 6 to3.
Clarence Thomas did not just vote with the majority. He wrote a 58page concurring opinion nearly 20 pages longer than Chief Justice Roberts’s majority opinion. It was only the second time in a decade that any justice had read a concurrence aloud from the bench of the Supreme Court. He called race conscious admissions plainly and boldly unconstitutional.
He responded directly to Justice Katanji Brown Jackson’s dissent, calling her reasoning cancerous to young minds. He voted to end affirmative action, the same policy that got him into Holy Cross, the same policy that got him into Yale law school, without which he does not sit on that bench inside the Supreme Court.
And while he wrote those words, his great nephew’s private school tuition was being paid by a white Republican billionaire. A year earlier, Thomas had joined the majority to overturn Ro versus Wade in the DOS decision. But he went further. In a solo concurrence, he wrote that the Supreme Court should also reconsider Griswald, the case protecting access to contraception, Lawrence, the case protecting same-sex relationships, and Oberfell, the case protecting same-sex marriage.
He listed three precedents for reconsideration. He left one out. Loving versus Virginia, the 1967 case that legalized interracial marriage in the United States. the case that protects his own marriage to Virginia Jenny Thomas, a white woman. He wanted to revisit contraception, samesex rights, and marriage equality, but not the one that applied to him personally.
On April 6th, 2023, ProPublica published an investigation that blew the lid off Clarence Thomas’ financial life, and it was worse than anyone expected. For over two decades, Thomas had been accepting gifts from a man named Haron Crowe. Crow is the chairman of Crow Holdings in Dallas, Texas, a real estate billionaire who inherited his fortune from his father, Traml Crowe.
He and his wife have contributed at least $14.7 million to political campaigns and committees over three decades. He is not just a friend. He is a man whose political network regularly files briefs before the Supreme Court. The gifts included private jet flights on Crow’s Bombardier Global 5000, a plane that costs upwards of $10,000 per hour to charter.
They included cruises on Crow’s 162 ft super yacht Michaela Rose. They included a 9-day trip to Indonesia in 2019 that ProPublica estimated could have exceeded $500,000 in charter equivalent. They included repeated visits to Crow’s 105 acre private resort at Topridge in the Aderandac Mountains and annual trips to the Bohemian Grove and exclusive allmale retreat in Northern California.
Thomas disclosed none of it. Federal ethics law passed after the Watergate scandal requires Supreme Court justices to publicly report most gifts. Thomas claimed a personal hospitality exemption. Seven ethics experts told ProPublica that interpretation was indefensible. Walter Shaw, former director of the United States Office of Government Ethics, said it is absolutely impossible that anyone could reasonably interpret that exception to apply to private jet flights, and the travel was just the beginning.
In October 2014, a company controlled by Haron Crow purchased three properties in Savannah, Georgia, belonging to Thomas and his family. One of those properties was the house on East 32nd Street where Thomas’s mother, Leola Williams, still lives. Crow paid $133,363. Then he renovated the house, added a new roof and carport, and started paying the annual property taxes.
Leola has lived there rentree ever since. The deed was personally signed by Thomas and notorized by a Supreme Court administrator named Perry Thompson. Thomas never disclosed the sale. Then ProPublica dropped another report. In 1997, Thomas and his wife Jenny had taken legal custody of his great nephew Mark Martin when the boy was 6 years old.
Thomas told C-SPAN he was raising him as a son. In 2008, he sent Martin to Hidden Lake Academy, a private boarding school in Dalenega, Georgia. Tuition ran over $6,000 a month. Thomas was not paying. Haron Crow was. Crow covered tuition at Hidden Lake Academy and then at Randolph Min Academy in Virginia, Crow’s own alma mater.
Thomas’s friend Mark Powetta confirmed one year at each school totaling roughly $100,000. Martin himself told ProPublica he did not even know Crow was paying. Thomas had previously disclosed a separate $5,000 education gift to Martin from a different donor, proving he knew these payments were supposed to be reported. The h 100,000 from Crow went undisclosed and Crow was not the only one.
David Soal, a Birkshire Hathaway alum, hosted Thomas at his ranch in Wyoming. Wayne Huzenga flew him on a private Boeing 737 flights valued at roughly $130,000 each way. Anthony Welters, a healthc care executive, paid off Thomas’ recreational vehicle loan, estimated between 253,000 and $267,000. Fix the court, a nonpartisan judicial watchdog, calculated in June 2024 that Thomas received at least $2.
4 million and 103 documented gifts from 2004 through 2023. rising to approximately $4.19 million when likely but unconfirmed gifts are included. A December 2024 report from Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats, led by Chairman Dick Durban, put the total even higher at more than $4.75 million since 1991. Nobody has been charged.
Nobody has been punished. In November 2023, the Supreme Court adopted its first ever code of conduct, but it has no enforcement mechanism. The Supreme Court Ethics Recusal and Transparency Act was blocked by Senate Republicans in 2024. The most powerful court in the country operates on the Honor System, and one man tested every boundary of it for 30 years.
You cannot tell the story of Clarence Thomas without his wife, Virginia Jenny Lamp. Thomas is a conservative political operative with over three decades in Washington DC. She graduated from Kraton Law School, worked for a Republican congressman from Nebraska, then spent years at the Heritage Foundation and the United States Chamber of Commerce.
In 2010, she founded Liberty Consulting, which she described as making her an ambassador to the Tea Party movement. She sits on the board of the Council for National Policy, one of the most influential conservative advocacy networks in the country. But before any of that, in the early 1980s, she was in a cult.
Jenny Thomas was a member of Lifespring, a group that former members and cult researchers have described as a mind control organization. She was deprogrammed in 1984. A 1986 video shows her speaking to a support group of former members about her experience. In a 1987 Washington Post interview, she said she had intellectually and emotionally gotten herself so wrapped up with the group that she was moving away from her family and friends.
She met Clarence Thomas at a 1986 conference on affirmative action. They married in May 1987. After Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election, Jenny Thomas sent at least 29 text messages to White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows between November 5th, 2020 and January 10th, 2021. 21 were from her, eight were from Meadows.
On November 10th, 4 days after Biden was projected the winner, she texted Meadows urging him to help the president stand firm and saying, “The majority knows Biden and the left is attempting the greatest heist of our history.” She urged Meadows to make Cydney Powell, a conspiracy theorist pushing debunked voter fraud claims, the lead of Trump’s legal team.
She used Q Anon style language. She shared a video promoting the false claim that the Sandy Hook school massacre was a staged event. She also used the phrase release the Kraken in messages urging action. On January 6th, 2021, she attended Trump’s stop the steel rally near the White House in Washington. She posted on Facebook that morning expressing support for MAGA people and offering blessings to those standing up or praying.
She later deleted those posts. When the January 6th committee tried to access Trump’s White House records to investigate the capital attack, the case went to the Supreme Court. Eight justices voted to release the records. One justice dissented. Clarence Thomas. He was the only vote to keep those records sealed.
Records that contain his wife’s text messages to the White House chief of staff about overturning the election. Jenny Thomas finally sat for a voluntary interview with the January 6th committee on September 29th, 2022. She spoke for roughly 4 and 1/2 hours inside the capital. She told investigators she still believed the 2020 election was stolen.
She insisted that she never discussed any of her post-election activities with her husband, saying it is an ironclad rule in their home. Nobody has been charged. No legal consequences for Jenny Thomas. None for Clarence Thomas. Clarence Thomas was born in a wooden shack in Pinpoint, Georgia with dirt floors and no plumbing.
His father left when he was two. His house burned down when he was seven. His grandfather took him in and taught him one thing above everything else. Do for yourself. Nobody is going to do it for you. And Clarence Thomas did do for himself. Pinpoint to Holy Cross to Yale to the Supreme Court. Every wrong of the latter that affirmative action, the Voting Rights Act and the sacrifices of millions of black Americans put in front of him.
Then he sat down in Thood Good Marshall’s chair inside the Supreme Court. And one by one, he started pulling those rungs out. He gutted the law that let his neighbors in Savannah vote. He killed the admissions policy that got him into two of the best schools in the country. He let a billionaire buy his mother’s house in Savannah, pay his nephew’s tuition at two boarding schools, and fly him around the world for 20 years while he voted on cases connected to that same billionaire’s political network.
And when his wife sent 29 texts to the White House trying to overturn an election, he was the only justice on the bench who voted to keep those records hidden. As of May 2026, Clarence Thomas holds the second longest tenure in Supreme Court history. He has given no indication of retirement. In his chambers inside the Supreme Court, there is a bust of Meyers Anderson.
The inscription reads, “Old man Kent is dead. I helped bury him. His grandfather built a business from nothing, joined the NAACP, and bailed out civil rights demonstrators with his own property. His grandson became the most powerful black man in the American legal system. And he used that power to make sure the door that opened for him would never open for anyone else.
