Clarence Thomas

Thomas was born in 1948 in Pin Point, Georgia, a community founded by freed people outside Savannah, and grew up speaking Gullah before he learned standard English. His father left the family when Thomas was about three; his mother, unable to support three children on domestic wages, sent Clarence and his younger brother to live with her father, Myers Anderson, a coal and ice deliveryman who had built a small business with no formal education behind him. Anderson, a convert to Catholicism, put the boys in Catholic schools and pushed Clarence toward the priesthood. He entered a seminary in 1967, one of its only Black students, and left the following year after a white classmate celebrated Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination in front of him.

Holy Cross took him on full scholarship in 1968, one of twenty Black students recruited that year; Yale Law followed, one of a dozen Black students in his class. Ronald Reagan made him a civil rights official and then, in 1982, chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, where he pushed the agency toward individual discrimination lawsuits and away from broad quota remedies. George H. W. Bush put him on the D.C. Circuit in 1990 and, the next year, on the Supreme Court, to fill the seat of Thurgood Marshall. He has since become the Court's most committed originalist and its member most willing to discard precedent outright — author of the 2022 opinion establishing a broad right to carry firearms in public, and, in 2024, the lone dissent when the Court upheld gun restrictions on people under domestic-violence orders.

His confirmation passed the Senate 52 to 48, the narrowest margin in more than a century, after Anita Hill, a former subordinate at the EEOC, testified that he had pressured her to date him and described pornography to her at work. Thomas denied it and called the hearings a high-tech lynching; a second former colleague, Angela Wright, made similar allegations in a deposition the committee chose not to call her to read aloud. Three decades later, ProPublica reported that the real-estate billionaire Harlan Crow had spent more than twenty years flying Thomas on private jets, hosting him on a superyacht, and paying private-school tuition for a relative Thomas was raising — gifts running to hundreds of thousands of dollars a year that Thomas never disclosed, and later acknowledged he should have.

Thomas is now the Court's most senior associate justice and one of the longest-serving in its history, the intellectual anchor of a conservative majority that has spent two decades absorbing his once-lonely dissents into law. His wife Ginni's texts urging Trump's chief of staff to overturn the 2020 election, made public by the January 6 committee in 2022, drew calls from senators and, according to one poll, roughly half the country for him to recuse himself from election-related cases; he has not. The admiration and the distrust run at full strength simultaneously, and neither side shows any sign of talking the other out of it.

Clarence Thomas's life against the full span of the corpus — the fading end marks a life still in progress.

• EEOC enforcement overhaul other
  Redirected the agency toward individual discrimination suits 1982
• My Grandfather's Son book
  His memoir, centered on Myers Anderson 2007
• New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen case
  Majority opinion establishing a broad right to carry firearms in public 2022
• United States v. Rahimi case
  Lone dissent from a ruling upholding gun restrictions on domestic-violence respondents 2024

• 1951 aged ~3 His father leaves the family
• 1955 aged ~7 Sent to live with his grandfather, Myers Anderson, in Savannah
• 1967 aged ~19 Enters a Catholic seminary intending to become a priest
• 1968 aged ~20 Leaves the seminary after a classmate celebrates King's assassination, enrolls at Holy Cross
• 1974 aged ~26 Earns his J.D. from Yale Law School
• 1982 aged ~34 Named chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission
• October 15, 1991 aged 43 Confirmed to the Supreme Court, 52 to 48, after the Anita Hill hearings
• 2022 aged ~74 The January 6 committee makes public his wife's texts urging the 2020 election be overturned
• 2023 aged ~75 ProPublica reports two decades of undisclosed gifts and travel from Harlan Crow

• Thurgood Marshall 1908–1993
  First African American Supreme Court Justice and lead attorney in Brown v. Board of Education. succeeded on the Court
• Antonin Scalia 1936–2016
  Justice whose advocacy of originalism and textualism transformed American legal interpretation. ideological ally on the bench
• George H. W. Bush 1924–2018
  41st president who managed the end of the Cold War and assembled the coalition for the Persian Gulf War. nominated him to the Court
• Ruth Bader Ginsburg 1933–2020
  Supreme Court Justice whose advocacy for gender equality made her a cultural icon. ideological contrast on the bench