Judge Clarence Thomas - A Rush to Character Judgement
Like most Black Americans, my experience and knowledge of Clarence Thomas, Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court, comes from what others have written or said about him, and not from a scholarly reading of his speeches, essays, or editorials. And my opinions of him were certainly not drawn from a thorough and intelligent translation and digestion of his Supreme Court opinions and dissentions.
When I first undertook to write this article, I set out to write a negative piece on Mr. Thomas, lambasting and deriding his stance on the issues as they concern Roe v. Wade, Miranda rights, the death penalty, racial gerrymandering, etc. But after doing the research for the article I came away with the sense that I, and perhaps a goodly number of my fellow Black Americans, have been doing Mr. Thomas a huge disfavor, namely, rushing to judge the Judge without sufficient evidence.
As I stated, I undertook a search for some of Judge Thomas' writings and what I found surprised me. I learned that he was once, and probably still is, an active member of the Civil Rights movement. That he was in Seminary School and dropped out after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy saying in a July 1998 speech before the National Bar Association (NBA) in Memphis, Tennessee, "for me it was the final straw in the struggle to retain my vocation to become a Catholic priest. Suddenly, this cataclysmic event ripped me from the moorings of my grandparents, my youth and my faith and catapulted me headlong into the abyss that Richard Wright seemed to describe years earlier. It was this event that shattered my faith in my religion and my country."
Powerful words, and ones I did not expect to hear from Mr. Thomas, but there they were nonetheless. The speech in its entirety is a powerful one, and I invite each of you who might read this article to followed the link provided below and read it for yourselves. In this same speech near the closing, Mr. Thomas addresses the current ground swell of criticism from the Black community over his record on the bench. He states, "It pains me deeply, or more deeply than any of you can imagine to be perceived by so many members of my race as doing them harm. All the sacrifice, all the long hours of preparation were to help, not to hurt. But what hurts more, much more is the amount of time and attention spent on manufactured controversies and media sideshows when so many problems cry out for constructive attention."
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