Clarence Thomas is an American jurist who serves as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. He was nominated by President George H.
W. Bush to succeed Thurgood Marshall and has served since 1991.
Clarence Thomas Biography
Clarence Thomas, (born June 23, 1948, Pinpoint, near Savannah, Georgia, U.S.), associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1991, the second African American to serve on the court. Appointed to replace Thurgood Marshall, the court’s first African American member, Thomas gave the court a decisive conservative cast.
Thomas’s father, M.C. Thomas, abandoned the family when Thomas was two years old. After the family house was destroyed by fire, Thomas’s mother, Leola Anderson Thomas, who worked as a maid, remarried.
Thomas, then age seven, and his brother were sent to live with their maternal grandparents. He was educated in Savannah, Georgia, at an all-Black Roman Catholic primary school run by white nuns and then at a boarding-school seminary, where he graduated as the only African American in his class. He attended Immaculate Conception Abbey in his freshman year of college and then transferred to Holy Cross College in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he graduated with a bachelor’s degree in 1971. He received a law degree from Yale University in 1974
Thomas was successively assistant attorney general in Missouri (1974–77), a lawyer with the Monsanto Company (1977–79), and a legislative assistant to Republican Senator John C. Danforth of Missouri (1979–81). In the Republican presidential administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, Thomas served as assistant secretary in the U.S. Department of Education (1981–82), chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC; 1982–90), and judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal District in Washington, D.C. (1990–91), a post to which he was appointed by Bush.
Marshall’s retirement gave Bush the opportunity to replace one of the court’s most liberal members with a conservative. The president was under significant political pressure to appoint another African American, and Thomas’s service under Republican senators and presidents made him an obvious choice. Despite his appeal to Republican partisans, however, his nomination engendered controversy for several reasons: he had little experience as a judge; he had produced little judicial scholarship; and he refused to answer questions about his position on abortion (he claimed during his confirmation hearings that he had never discussed the issue).
Nevertheless, Thomas seemed headed for easy confirmation until a former aide stepped forward to accuse him of sexual harassment, a subject that dominated the latter stages of the hearings. The aide, Anita Hill, a Black law professor at the University of Oklahoma who had worked for Thomas at the EEOC and the Department of Education, alleged in televised hearings that Thomas had made sexually offensive comments to her in an apparent campaign of seduction. Thomas denied the charge and accused the Senate Judiciary Committee of engineering a “high-tech lynching.” A deeply divided Senate only narrowly confirmed Thomas’s nomination by a vote of 52 to 48.
Does Clarence Thomas have any biological children?
Clarence Thomas only has one child, a son named Jamal Adeen Thomas. He had this son with his first wife, Kathy Ambush.
What religion is Clarence Thomas’s wife?
Virginia and Clarence Thomas married in 1987. The couple live in Virginia. Thomas converted from Protestantism to her husband’s Catholic faith in 2002.