Silent Justice : The Clarence... | Buy

Chapter One

Pin Point, Georgia

One night in the spring of 1945, a young civil rights lawyer by the name of Thurgood Marshall, on a swing through Southern states trying cases and gathering information that would culminate, a decade later, in the landmark desegregation decision of Brown v. The Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas , stopped briefly in Pin Point, Georgia, and spoke at the Brotherhood of Friendship Society meeting hall. It is highly unlikely that anyone in the audience that night, as impressed as they must have been by the passion of this fiery advocate, would have predicted that two decades later he would become the first African-American named to the United States Supreme Court. What none of them could have known, and would never have been so foolish as to predict, was that in March of 1948, in a one-story, one-room wooden shack just down the dirt road from the meeting hall, by the three-room school house and the seafood packing plant and across from the Sweet Fields of Eden Church, would be born a male child who would grow up to become the second African-American named to the United States Supreme Court. Some things are just too far fetched.

Even though it was located but seven miles from Savannah, in terms of style and grace the Pin Point, Georgia, of the 1940s and 1950s was light years away from its big city neighbor to the west. With a population of 500, Pin Point was more hamlet than town, more drive-past than drive-in. The thought that this little bump in the road could be the birthplace of a child who would rise to become a justice of the United States Supreme Court--a black child who would rise to become a justice of the United States Supreme Court--was inconceivable. The distance from here to there, or, as the justice himself would grow fond of saying, from the outhouse to the courthouse, was simply too great. A black child from Pin Point, Georgia, becoming a member of the U.S. Supreme Court? It simply couldn't happen. Except that it did.

* * *

For Clarence Thomas, the seven-pound infant brought into the world by a midwife on the night of June 23, 1948, the child destined to inherit the chair, if not follow in the footsteps, of Thurgood Marshall, Pin Point was his whole world, at least in the beginning. The household into which Clarence Thomas was born consisted of his mother, Leola, his sister Emma Mae, and, for a short while, his father, a farmer known simply as M.C. Thomas. When Clarence was two, his mother gave birth to her third child, a son she named Myers after her father, Myers Anderson, a man whose influence would loom large in the future of Clarence Thomas.

Poor and hard-scrabble as it was, Pin Point was not without its attractive aspects. Warm weather brought a profusion of flowers common to the low country, such as azaleas, giant hydrangeas, watermelon flowers, and magnolias. The streets may have been little more than dirt roads, but they led to the ocean and the salt marshes, where even children as poor as the three Thomases could enjoy trolling for crabs at the water's edge or tossing a ball made from an old stocking stuffed with Spanish Moss that grew on so many of the area's multitudinous trees.

Few of the houses, most of which had been set above the watery soil on cinder blocks or large, sawed-off, tree-trunk sections, had more than one room, and there were no amenities such as shades for the single bulbs that gave them what little light they had after dark. The house in which Clarence Thomas was born, and in which he lived for the first five years of his life, like almost all of the others, had no indoor plumbing and certainly no indoor toilet. Water came from a pump in the yard, and the outhouse was a shared affair, servicing the needs of several adjacent families as well as their own. Another common sight behind each dwelling was a small vegetable garden, or patch, from which came healthy fare to go along with the staples of shrimp and fish. Both inside and outside the simple dwellings, neatness was evident. As the most famous former resident of Pin Point would say many years later, "We were poor but proud. I keep hearing this connection between disorder and poverty. You didn't see any disorder."

The house in which Thomas spent his first years (it was actually the house of his aunt, Annie Graham) was next door to Varn & Son, the crab and oyster packing plant where his mother worked, and where she was known to be the fastest of the fast. As she told one of her son Clarence's first biographers, "I could do seventy-five pounds if I sat there all day. When I was pregnant with Clarence, I would go home and lie down for a while, then I'd go back and still beat them all." She also recounted the time she and other crab and oyster pickers, who were paid five cents a pound, threatened to go out on strike for more money: "We were going to strike for 10 cents, but when the man came in no one said a word. They knew I was the one to shoot my mouth off, so they all looked at me and I spoke up and we got it. It's no wonder where Clarence got it from to speak his mind."

Poor as they were-- everyone in Pin Point was poor--the Thomas family got by, barely, on the wages of Leola and the somewhat sporadic earnings of M.C. But when Clarence was two years old, there was a major alteration in his world. His father, who had never been the most faithful of men, had impregnated his latest girlfriend, and when Leola confronted him and asked what he planned to do about it, M.C. solved the problem by taking off for Philadelphia and abandoning the family just months before the birth of his second son, Myers. For all intents and purposes, he would never again be a factor in Clarence's life, at least not a positive one.

With her wages from the plant, and whatever else Leola could pick up working as a maid in nearby Savannah, the family made do. While the total family income was probably below what was considered subsistence level at the time in rural Georgia, life, at least for a child, was not without some saving graces. As preschoolers, the three Thomas children made the dusty streets and the waters' edges their playgrounds. One biographer would later write in a book that was part of a series on distinguished African-Americans, "If the children were lucky enough to find an abandoned tire, they climbed into it and gleefully rolled down the road. A discarded bicycle wheel provided hours of entertainment; they made it roll along by using a stick or a bent hangar, and when they tired of that, they took out the spokes and flung the wheel through the air with backspin, so that it landed in the dust and rolled back to them. They made trains from soda cans and fashioned skatemobiles from old skate wheels and stray pieces of wood."

In a speech he gave to a conservative religious group (The Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty) five years after becoming a member of the Supreme Court, Clarence Thomas talked about those early days: "Almost a decade ago I heard a minister say that we were money-poor and values-rich in our youth. That is certainly true of my youth, though I did not know that we were money-poor until I was told so during my college years. Indeed, as long as we had food on the table, a roof over our heads, and clothes on our backs, we were money-rich. In all those years I didn't hear a single complaint about what we didn't have. Sure, we were told as kids we couldn't have this or that toy, because there was no money for it. But this was not offered as a complaint, but rather as a realistic assessment of our financial position as a family. Not getting what we wanted when we wanted it (or at all) didn't mean we were money-poor."

Four years later, in a speech to a similar group (The John M. Ashbrook Center for Public Affairs, part of Ashland University in Ashland, Ohio), he touched on the same theme. Referring to the current day, he said that in contrast to the "positive environment" in which he'd grown up, "What we're doing [nowadays] is inundating these kids with negatives. Everything is negative. You can't do this, you can't do that. And then we allow the neighborhoods in which they live to be in chaos. I grew up in a neighborhood that wasn't considered a great neighborhood, but it was peaceful. It was conducive to survival. And the people were just good upstanding people. We weren't assaulted when we went to school. We weren't in fear for our lives. You could walk to the library. It was poor and lots of people grew up like that. For the life of me, I don't understand why those of us who say we are so passionate about little kids can't see that they can't grow up in these environments."

In 1954, the year Thurgood Marshall and his team of dedicated civil rights lawyers won the Brown case, Clarence Thomas started first grade. It was also the year he got his first pair of shoes, along with some hand-me-down clothes from a local church. From 1950, when his father left the family, until 1955, young Clarence had been living a relatively carefree life. Because it was a safe family-oriented community, Clarence and his siblings, especially his younger brother Myers, were allowed a good deal of freedom to roam the immediate neighborhood. In time, Leola Thomas gave up her job at the crab and oyster packing plant and went off to work as a cleaning woman or maid in nearby Savannah. The boys, left in the care of their aunt, who also led a hard life, had even less supervision.

One day in 1955, when Clarence and Emma Mae were in school and their aunt was at work, Myers, who was supposed to be staying with and under the care of an uncle, wandered back into Aunt Annie's little ramshackle house. Somehow, a flimsy curtain touched the red-hot wood stove, and within minutes the tarpaper shack was engulfed in flames and soon destroyed completely.

New arrangements had to be made in a hurry, and once the dust, if not the ashes, had settled, Clarence and Myers were living in Savannah with their mother, and Emma Mae was back in Pin Point with Aunt Annie.

Home for Leola and her two growing boys was one room in a crowded tenement building on a busy block in a black commercial area. The kitchen, such as it was, had to be shared with the three other families that lived in the rundown building. Again, there was no indoor toilet. In fact, the old-fashioned privy in the backyard was often unusable. Leola made but 10 or 15 dollars a week, and one room was all she could afford. That winter--the first to follow the historic Supreme Court decision in the Brown desegregation case--she enrolled Clarence in first grade, afternoon session only, in the Florence School, an all-black public school where, he later admitted, he spent most of the time staring out the window. Before long young Clarence Thomas would discover the joys of reading, but whoever it was who lit the lamp of his love for learning, it was not anyone in the Florence School.

Clarence lost more than his boyish innocence in the move to Savannah. He also lost his unawareness of racial prejudice. Tiny little Pin Point had so few public buildings there was no need to segregate its facilities, but in Savannah, the signs were everywhere. "Room for Rent, White Only" "White Faucet." "White Entrance." "Whites Only Need Apply." Even the library, which Clarence looked upon with awe, was for white readers only. He would have to use the Carnegie Library in the "colored section." It was not just a different world, it was the real world.

One thing that did not change was the amount of freedom he and his younger brother Myers enjoyed. With their mother working all day, and no Aunt Annie or older sister to check on their whereabouts, they roamed the streets of their black Savannah neighborhood almost at will. While their mother worried about this state of affairs, there was little she could do about it. Her fears, however, reached a point where she was forced to seek the help of her own father, a stern man with whom she did not have a close relationship.

Dictionaries should carry a picture of Myers Anderson alongside the definitions of the words "self-made" and "industrious." Even though he was not able to attend school past the third grade, he was a man of sharp intelligence, fierce pride, and gargantuan work habits. Had he lived today, he'd be called an entrepreneur. Among his early businesses were an ice delivery route and a wood delivery route. When he invested in a machine to make cinder blocks, he didn't just sell the product, he used it to build three small houses; one became his own dwelling and the others were "rent houses." His most successful venture was his home heating-oil delivery business which prospered in part because Myers was willing to get up every morning at 3:30 and get down to the wholesaler to buy his day's supply. Along with a friend, he started a black nightclub that became so popular--and profitable--that the landlord took it away from him. While other proud African-Americans of his generation might have become bitter as a result of such a setback, it only made Myers Anderson work harder. And when he attempted to get a license for his fuel delivery business, it was denied, and he was advised to get a white man to front for him. Again, Myers shouldered the rebuff and went his own way, just as he did when he was told that because of his race he could not take the test to become a certified electrician even though he had the requisite knowledge and experience and had, in fact, already wired the premises in question (his three houses) himself.

Still seething 30 years later, Clarence Thomas told an interviewer: "My grandfather had an opportunity to make a lot of money during the building boom after the Korean War and World War II, but he couldn't get the license. A black person could not obtain an electrician's license. So what they would do is wire an entire house and then pay maybe $100 to a white electrician to connect the wire from the post to the box--about a two-minute job."

Savannah, Georgia, in the 1940s and 1950s was ruled by Plessy v. Ferguson (and in some pockets Dred Scott ), and not by the rationale of the Brown decision.

The reason that Leola Thomas and her father were not close was the long-standing tension over the fact that he had never married her mother. The two had met in a rural area quite a way from Savannah, and after Leola was born, Myers had, in effect, sent mother and child off to Pin Point and Aunt Annie. He then married another woman, and they moved to Savannah where he began his steady climb up the economic ladder. Leola was forced to grow up a fatherless child, a scar she still bore as a young adult beginning her own family. But now, in 1955, she had hit a very rough patch, and, worried what might happen to her two rambunctious sons, she finally turned to her father for help.

Myers Anderson represented more than just a better alternative, more than simply a safe haven. He was a rock. In addition to owning his own business, he was a man of property. But, even more important as far as the future of his two young grandsons was concerned, he was a man of principle and probity. If they moved into his house and came under his care and discipline, they would stand a very good chance of growing up to become real men.

Knowing this, Leola swallowed her pride and asked her father to take her children. She would continue to live in Savannah and provide whatever help she could. But Myers, Sr. said no. Fortunately for Clarence and Myers, Jr., their step-grandmother was a kind woman. Tina and Myers had never had children of their own, and most of the people who knew the families would have understood, given Tina's age and situation, if she'd resisted the idea of bringing two rough-and-tumble boys into her comfortable and orderly environment. But Christina (or simply Tina or Teenie) Anderson felt just the opposite way. She not only believed that Myers had an obligation to help his daughter and his grandchildren, but actively encouraged him to do so.

Eventually, Myers agreed, but not entirely. He would take the two boys, and he would raise them as he saw fit, but the girl, Emma Mae, would have to go back to Aunt Annie in Pin Point. With the possible exception of Emma Mae, it was a good deal for everyone concerned, especially Clarence and little Myers. Instead of one room in a crowded tenement building, they now lived in a house with six rooms, a real kitchen out of which came three good meals every single day, and an indoor toilet that worked all the time.

The most important change, however, was that they now had, for the first time in their young lives, a male role model. So great would be the influence of Myers Anderson on Clarence Thomas that one of the first items the younger man took with him in 1991 to his chambers at the U.S. Supreme Court was a bronze bust of his grandfather. Across its base was inscribed one of Myers's favorite aphorisms: "Old Man Can't is dead. I helped bury him."

Unlike many older people who favor such expressions, Myers Anderson lived them in his daily life. Like the military officer who would never order his men to do a difficult task that he would not do himself, Myers practiced what he preached. Years later, in his speeches, Clarence Thomas would include another of his grandfather's favorites, one that was designed to rid the boys of any ideas of ever skipping school: "He would tell us, `If you die, I'll take you to school for two days to make sure you're not faking.'" Then, revealing a hint of his characteristic sense of humor, Thomas would add, "I often wondered if the other students would object to a dead person being in the classroom."

In addition to his belief in a strong work ethic, Myers also had a strong religious belief, having converted from the Baptist faith to Catholicism as an adult. For himself, he saw the Church as his ultimate salvation; for his grandsons, he saw it as their immediate educational salvation. Thus Clarence and Myers, Jr. soon found themselves enrolled in St. Benedict the Moor, a Catholic grade school. The school was staffed by Irish nuns, members of a branch of the brown-robed Franciscan order that had been started in the early 1900s specifically to educate poor African-American children. So strong was the influence of the Irish nuns on the young African-American students that some of the children eventually began to speak with a brogue. Welcome as the nuns were to the parents of their charges, they were considered meddling outsiders by many white adults, especially the more bigoted ones. The KKK, who always called them the "Nigger nuns," once parked an empty hearse in front of their convent as a not-too-subtle warning.

Between the nuns and his grandfather, young Clarence Thomas learned both the meaning and the practice of discipline. Dressed in his school uniform of blue pants, blue sweater, white shirt, and dark tie and shoes, he marched off to St. Benedict's and a much more rigid and difficult educational environment than he was used to. At first there were some adjustment problems--his second grade nun gave him three Ds, but they were the last Ds he was ever to see on a report card. Once he got with the program, Clarence Thomas excelled. Clearly, he was motivated by more than fear of his grandfather's belt. He didn't just learn to read; he learned to love reading. He also took part in a wide variety of school activities, both secular and religious, becoming a crossing guard, an altar boy, and holding class office. The one thing about which he had no doubt was the sincerity of the nuns' desire that he go as far in life as he could possibly go--and that he get there on his own efforts and merit. "They made us believe we were the equal of anybody," he would repeat years later, "and they gave us the same tests the white schools took. They refused to let us buy into the notion that we could never do well, despite all the stereotypes of inferiority around us."

Many years later, he told a primary school graduating class: "One of the rewards I received when I graduated from the eighth grade was a knock on my head from Sister Mary Virgilius--well, it was a love tap, and it was simply to remind me that I was pretty lazy, and I was....

"The nuns kept expectations high, but they also provided us with a firm love, and they had a conviction that indeed we could do--and they saw to it that we did it."

Seeing to it that he did "it"--an abstraction that covered a lot of ground--was also a chief aim of Clarence's grandfather. It was clear from the day they moved in with him and Tina that Myers Anderson had no intention of letting Clarence and his brother continue their lay-about ways. Come Saturday morning, if they weren't out of bed by 7:00, he'd be in the backyard yelling through their window, "Laziness is for the rich. Y'all think you're rich?"

The boys had work to do everyday. Whether it was chores around the house or help with the heating-oil deliveries, they worked before school and from the time they got home to dinner time and then again after that. As a reward for his diligence and good grades, if it was still before nine o'clock when the work was finished, Clarence would be allowed to run down to the Carnegie Library. Years later, when asked about his formative years, he would seldom fail to remember, and praise, what he called simply, "the librarians at the segregated library at Carnegie." After a while, his family learned that when Clarence couldn't be found, the first place to look for him would be the Carnegie Library on East Henry Street.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Silent Justice by John Greenya. Copyright © 2001 by John Greenya. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.