When the Smithsonian’s National Museum for African American History and Culture opened last month in Washington, the bipartisan feel of the moment — which included what may become an iconic picture of former President George W. Bush embracing first lady Michelle Obama — soon gave way to some conservatives refusing to celebrate who was included in the museum, choosing instead to gripe about who was not.
Namely, the source of conservative discontent derives from the fact that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas was excluded from enshrinement.
{mosads}The historical irony in Thomas’s snub lies in the fact that 25 years ago this week, Thomas was confirmed by a slim 52 to 48 margin in the Senate after intense confirmation hearings centered upon his alleged sexual harassment of law professor Anita Hill during their time as colleagues at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
That year, 1991, saw the beginning of my sophomore year at Morehouse College and in the fall, I was granted my first op-ed column for the school’s “Maroon Tiger” newspaper.
My very first article, in fact, was a defense of Thomas.
Many of my schoolmates believed that because Thomas was a conservative Republican, he lacked knowledge of self and was not worthy to succeed Thurgood Marshall, a man who was a legendary civil rights champion long before becoming the the first black justice in 1967. As a young conservative myself at the time, one who was endowed with a vast knowledge of black history, I assumed that Thomas, too, would be able to balance conservative principles with a fealty and deference to the black experience in America.
I was dead wrong.
What I did not know at the time was that Thomas’s experiences growing up in the Jim Crow South had shaped him in a way that was not remotely similar to how both of my parents were impacted by the same events.
You see, it was not until a few years ago, when I read Thomas’s book “My Grandfather’s Son” that I realized how naive I was in ’91.
In his book, Thomas recounts a tough childhood, one in which his mother abandoned him and his siblings, to be raised by his stern grandfather, Myers Anderson, near Savannah, Georgia. Thomas felt that his grandfather was too tough on him as he strove to drive the Gullah or “Geechee” dialect from his grandchildren’s tongues and make them more acceptable to whites.
Thomas hints that part of his reticence to speak in public, which today includes his penchant to remain silent during oral arguments before the Supreme Court, stems from being embarassed by his dialect. Thomas also remembered being extremely bitter that his grandfather refused to allow him to enroll at Morehouse, the alma mater of then-recent Nobel laureate Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., during the turbulent 1960s. Anderson forced Thomas to pursue studies as a priest at the College of the Holy Cross.
But it was Thomas’s experiences years later at Yale University that defined what would one day make him palatable to conservatives: his aversion to affirmative action and “liberal” programs designed to improve the lives of black people.
Indeed, when Thomas learned that in the first years of integration in the late ’60s and early ’70s that he would not have been admitted to law school at Yale but for a minority set-aside program (affirmative action), instead of appreciating the fact that he was afforded an opportunity to study alongside the nation’s intellectual elite — including Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton, Lani Guinier and other influential classmates — he became bitter and rolled his diploma up and left it in a box in his garage.
During the confirmation hearings, Thomas’s misogyny was manifest in his alleged love of pornography, one in which Hill testified that she and other female subordinates were subjected to as Thomas bragged about the latest exploits of porn star Long Dong Silver. Such gauche behavior, which includes Hill’s testimony about Thomas’s now infamous “pubic hair on the can of Coke” comment, are considered the low point of Thomas’s confirmation hearings.
Indeed, to this very day, Thomas, much like many conservatives such as Republican nominee Donald Trump, have a penchant of invoking God and acting puritanical in public, but being prurient in their words and deeds behind closed doors.
But as a 19-year-old in ’91, the true low point was not in learning that Thomas was a lothario; rather, it was in realizing that the same man who talked about how he was different from black victims of the Civil Rights movement actually invoked victim status — if not the legacy of old Jim Crow itself — when the confirmation hearings got contentious, saying that he was being subjected to a “high-tech lynching.”
Oh, the irony!
I did not realize back in 1991 that in 2016, affirmative action — which Thomas opposed — would still be a polarizing issue. I did not realize back in 1991 that sexism and boorish behavior would be summarily dismissed as a major issue with respect to powerful men even in 2016 — thus the popularity of Trump and Bill Clinton, no matter how salacious their past behavior toward women.
Understanding such, I take complaints from those on the right about Thomas’s exclusion from the Smithsonian with a grain of salt because, truth be told, historical “seconds” are rarely as significant as “firsts”; we celebrate Jackie Robinson breaking the color barrier in Major League Baseball each April, not Larry Doby for becoming the second black man to do so.
But to the point, Thomas has been an unremarkable jurist, one who for years played sidekick to the late Justice Antonin Scalia while providing a black face to conservative attempts to increase the police state that haunts so many blacks, while also rolling back hard-fought civil liberties for blacks and women seeking legal redress.
If Clarence Thomas is enshrined in the Smithsonian some day, it will have to be a joint exhibit with Anita Hill. That is his true legacy and 25 years later, I still cannot forget watching a highly educated, professional black man locked in a pivotal game of political chess where he was not the chess master, but a pawn used by conservatives to provide a black face for their racist and sexist agenda.
Hobbs is a lawyer, freelance writer and regular contributor to The Hill. Follow him on Twitter @RealChuckHobbs.
The views expressed by contributors are their own and not the views of The Hill.