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.