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.