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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.