Clarence Thomas was born in a small town outside of Savannah, Georgia, in 1948 (Brock, 1993, 62). When his father left the family, Thomas was still a young child, and his mother had to support Thomas, his older sister, and younger brother. At the age of 8, Thomas went to live with his mother's parents and helped his grandfather work on a truck. Thomas then attended a segregated Catholic school (Brock, 1993, 62). Later, during one of Thomas's speeches, he commented about this education, saying, "I grew up under state enforced segregation, which is as close to totalitarianism as I would like to get (Ibid., 63)." He also said that the household he grew up in was "more conservative than many who fashion themselves as conservative today (Ibid.)."
By the 11th grade, Thomas was attending the St. John Vianney Minor Seminary and was the only black student in his class. Under his high school yearbook photograph were the words: "Blew that exam, only got a 98 (Brock, 1993, 63)." .Thomas then went to Holy Cross College, where he majored in English and graduated with honors in 1971. The day after his college graduation, Thomas married Kathy Ambush, and a few years later they had a son, Jamal. (He would later remarry, this time to a white woman, Virginia, who shared his conservative views.)
Years before Thomas was appointed as Chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, he had already experienced what he perceived as the backlash of racial preference policies. An affirmative action program had already begun at Yale Law School by the time Thomas was admitted. Some of Thomas's classmates at Yale, particularly the white liberals, thought that Thomas was one of the token blacks that Yale had to admit; in other words, Thomas was at Yale because he was black. Yet Thomas believed that he had risen out of the poverty of Pinpoint, Georgia, in spite of the fact that he was black. The opinions of Thomas's classmates at Yale may hav...