Clarence Thomas is the longest-serving Justice on the Supreme Court. When
he joined the bench, on October 19, 1991, the Soviet Union was a country,
Hillary Clinton was Arkansas�s First Lady, and Donald Trump had recently
declared the first of his businesses� six bankruptcies. Since then,
Thomas has written more than seven hundred opinions, staking out
controversial positions on gun rights and campaign finance that have come
to command Supreme Court majorities. �Thomas�s views,� the Yale law
professor Akhil Reed Amar has said, �are now being followed by a majority
of the Court in case after case.� That was in 2011. Today Thomas is
joined on the Court by Neil Gorsuch, who frequently signs on to Thomas�s
opinions, and Brett Kavanaugh. Eleven of his former clerks have been
nominated by Trump to the federal bench. Four of them sit on the Court of
Appeals, just one step away from the Supreme Court.

By consensus, Thomas is the most conservative member of the Court. So
it�s surprising that the central theme of his jurisprudence is race. When
he was nearly forty years old, just four years shy of his appointment to
the Court, Thomas set out the foundations of his vision in a profile in
The Atlantic. �There is nothing you can do to get past black skin,� he
said. �I don�t care how educated you are, how good you are at what you
do�you�ll never have the same contacts or opportunities, you�ll never be
seen as equal to whites.� This was no momentary indiscretion; it was the
distillation of a lifetime of learning, which began in the segregated
precincts of Savannah, during the nineteen-fifties, and continued through
his college years, in the sixties. On the Court, Thomas continues to
believe�and to argue, in opinion after opinion�that race matters; that
racism is a constant, ineradicable feature of American life; and that the
only hope for black people lies within themselves, not as individuals but
as a separate community with separate institutions, apart from white
people.

This vision is what sets Thomas apart from his fellow-conservatives on
the bench, who believe that racism is either defeated or being
diminished. It�s a vision that first emerged during Thomas�s early years,
when he was on the left and identified, on a profound level, with the
tenets of black nationalism. Like most ideological commitments, Thomas�s
politics are selective, but much of the program he embraced in his
youth�celebration of black self-sufficiency, support for racial
separatism�remains vital to his beliefs today. Those beliefs are coming
closer, each term, to being enshrined in the law. Thomas writes, on
average, thirty-four opinions a year�more than any other Justice. Despite
that, the only things most Americans know about him are that he was once
accused of sexual harassment and that he almost never speaks from the
bench.

Thomas was born in 1948, in Pin Point, Georgia, an impoverished black
community that was founded by freed slaves. In his memoir �My
Grandfather�s Son,� from 2007, Thomas�s memories of Pin Point are
pastoral�rolling bicycle rims down sandy roads, catching minnows in the
creek. His family�s move to Savannah, when Thomas was six, brought this
idyll to an end. In Pin Point, Thomas fed himself directly from the land
and the water, feasting on �a lavish and steady supply of fresh food:
shrimp, crab, conch, oysters, turtles, chitterlings, pig�s feet, ham
hocks, and plenty of fresh vegetables.� In Savannah, before he moved in
with his grandparents, he spooned up �cornflakes moistened with a mixture
of water and sweetened condensed milk.�

Savannah was also where Thomas claims he had his first experience of
race�at the hands not of whites but of blacks. Though Thomas began
elementary school in 1954, four months after the Supreme Court declared
segregation unconstitutional, he grew up, by his own report, in an
�entirely black environment.� His nickname in the schoolyard and the
streets was �ABC���America�s Blackest Child.� �If he were any blacker,�
his classmates jeered, �he�d be blue.� Color was code for class. The
darkness of Thomas�s skin�along with the Gullah-Geechee dialect he
retained from Pin Point�was a sign of his lowly status and origin.
�Clarence had big lips, nappy hair, and he was almost literally black,� a
schoolmate told Jane Mayer and Jill Abramson in their 1994 book �Strange
Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas.� �Those folks were at the bottom
of the pole. You just didn�t want to hang with those kids.�

For Thomas, these cruelties are a lifelong hurt. �People love to talk
about conflicts interracially,� he told the reporter Ken Foskett, who
published a biography of Thomas, �Judging Thomas,� in 2004. �They never
talk about the conflicts and tensions intraracially.� From a young age,
the primary divide Thomas had to confront came from the privileges
associated with black wealth and light skin. �You had the black �lite,
the schoolteachers, the light-skinned people, the dentists, the doctors,�
Thomas has said. �My grandfather was down at the bottom. They would look
down on him. Everybody tries to gloss over that now, but it was the
reality.� It wasn�t until 1964, when he switched to an �lite Catholic
boarding school outside Savannah, that Thomas would share a classroom
with whites. Later, he would call state-enforced segregation �as close to
totalitarianism as I would like to get.�

If the move from Pin Point to Savannah introduced Thomas to one side of
the color line, his journey north, for college, introduced him to
another. Thomas spent one year at a Catholic seminary in Missouri, then
enrolled, in 1968, at the College of the Holy Cross, one of the poorest
of nineteen young black men recruited by John Brooks, a liberal Jesuit
who would become the school�s president. Holy Cross was located in
Worcester, a small city near Boston with a black population of two per
cent. At the time, the college was even whiter than its environs. The
summer before Thomas arrived, the school contacted incoming white
students to see if they would object to having a black roommate. In a
survey, between a quarter and a half of Thomas�s classmates agreed with
the following statements: that black people �have less ambition� than
whites; that black people have �looser morals� than whites; that black
people �smell different� from whites. In a 1987 letter to the Wall Street
Journal, Thomas wrote, �A new media fad is to constantly harp on the
plight of black college students on predominantly white campuses. Believe
it or not, the problems are the same as they were 20 years ago. . . . The
major difference is that the media paid little attention to them then.�

Before heading north, Thomas had a situation, not a story. He knew Jim
Crow and, like many African-Americans, endured the shape-shifting
violence of its demise. He had read and loved Richard Wright: �He�s an
angry black novelist, and I was an angry black man,� he said in �Judging
Thomas.� But he hadn�t yet come to a world view about race. In the North,
which he thought to be even more hostile than the South, Thomas found
that world view in the black nationalism that inspired many African-
Americans of the era.

Within months of their arrival at Holy Cross, Thomas and his friends
organized themselves into the Black Student Union, where they tempered
their aspirations for inclusion with their demands for separation. The
B.S.U.�s founding statement called for the admission of more black
students, the hiring of black faculty, courses in black literature and
history, and campus events to showcase black artists. They prefaced their
demands with a rousing affirmation of black identity: �We, the Black
students of the College of the Holy Cross, in recognizing the necessity
for strengthening a sense of racial identity and group solidarity, being
aware of a common cause with other oppressed peoples, and desiring to
expose and eradicate social inequities and injustices, do hereby
establish the Black Student Union of Holy Cross.� Thomas typed up the
document and was elected secretary-treasurer.

The B.S.U. also published an eleven-point manifesto, which included these
rules:

The Black man must respect the Black woman. The Black man�s woman is
the most beautiful of all women.
. . .
The Black man must work with his Black brother.
. . .
The Black man wants. . . the right to perpetuate his race.
. . .
The Black man does not want or need the white woman. The Black man�s
history shows that the white woman is the cause of his failure to be the
true Black man.

The last rule caused some playful friction in the group. After the B.S.U.
learned that a member was dating a white woman, the group convened a mock
trial, found him guilty, and broke his Afro comb as a punishment. Thomas
took the rule more seriously, particularly after meeting Kathy Ambush, a
black woman, whom he would marry in 1971 and divorce in 1984. In a poem
he called �Is you is, or is you ain�t, a brother?� he set out the
obligations of black men to black women. Even in that milieu, Kevin
Merida and Michael Fletcher reported in their 2007 biography, �Supreme
Discomfort,� Thomas�s �edgy race consciousness� stood out. When he saw an
interracial couple strolling on campus, he�d loudly demand, �Do I see a
black woman with a white man? How could that be?� Until 1986, when Thomas
met Virginia Lamp, who is white and would become his second wife, he
opposed interracial sex and marriage.