A recollection of the Clarence Thomas hearings

The HBO docudrama about the notorious Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings in the U.S. Senate in 1991, “Confirmation,” brings back interesting insights to Supreme Court and Congress watchers. The irony of Thomas’s nomination by then-President George H.W. Bush began the intrigue. That Thomas would be the “replacement” for the iconic civil rights hero Thurgood Marshall was a cynical insult to admirers of Marshall’s immense role in the early days of the civil rights battles of that time. The Thomas and Robert Bork hearings were the prelude to the contentious and partisan confirmation process that we are now witnessing in the politicization of President Obama’s latest appointment by the Senate Republican leadership.

{mosads}The New York Times review of the current documentary calls it a “linear story” that “doesn’t develop its characters beyond headline figures.” I agree with that assessment, but I do recall one personal insight the hearings provided me that was not a headline, or a linear story, and I report it now because it is an anecdote that decades later still remains with me.

One of Anita Hill’s counsels came to me after the hearings to discuss a forthcoming book about Hill’s role in the hearings, how the shy professor from Oklahoma became the controversial witness presented by opponents of the Thomas appointment to demonstrate his alleged lack of judicial temperament because of inappropriate behavior toward women who worked for him, as Hill did, on the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. As we spoke about her contemplated book, she told me a story that stunned me.

During his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, when Thomas was questioned by Democratic committee members (as Hill was questioned roughly by defenders on the Republican side), Thomas exclaimed, famously, that the hearings were a “high-tech lynching.” My client, herself an African-American law professor, told me that she knew of many African-Americans who were offended by Thomas’s remark because all of them recalled knowing about a lynching in their own family history. That Thomas would equate his stressful questioning by the committee with a lynching was demeaning to these African-Americans as they knew how inappropriate that comparison was, in personal ways others never could.

I was struck by this revelation, having thought that lynchings were an unusual part of American history. That many African-Americans at the end of the 20th century had a family story that included a lynching amazed me. Understanding that fact — how the memory of lynchings are a part of the intellectual DNA of modern African-Americans who never experienced that awful event personally, but knew of it in deeply personal ways — is essential as current racial episodes play out and are debated in modern-day America. It was reminiscent of the experiences of American Jews today, most of whom carry with them a horrible Holocaust story in their family history that left them with lifelong impressions of anti-Semitism, and which affect their perspectives today.

That instructive experience with my client decades ago remains in my perspective of American social action today. As I watched the HBO series looking for that scene to be replayed, I wondered whether the audience would be struck by that explosive scene as it is portrayed, and as I now forever will.

Goldfarb is a Washington, D.C.-based attorney, literary agent and author of several books on criminal justice and media.