Stephen B. Presser: Books on Clarence Thomas more positive now
... With the exception of a few evenhanded works such as Scott Gerber’s 1998 First Principles, which praised Thomas as a dedicated champion of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, most assessments of Thomas tended to be much more critical than favorable. Then two books came along that convincingly argued both that Anita Hill had fabricated her charges and that Thomas was anything but in over his head as a justice: attorney and author Andrew Peyton Thomas’s Clarence Thomas: A Biography, in 2001; and Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter Ken Foskett’s Judging Thomas: The Life and Times of Clarence Thomas, in 2004.
The books also told the compelling story of Thomas’s rise from poverty. His taciturn grandfather, Myers Anderson, had abandoned Thomas’s mother when she was a small child, and initially, he wanted nothing to do with young Clarence or his brother. But when Thomas’s mother married a man who didn’t want the boys around, Thomas’s step-grandmother persuaded Anderson to take the boys in, and he raised them, reluctantly, in the small town of Pin Point, Georgia. Anderson did, in his aloof way, come to cherish his grandsons, though he made them work backbreaking hours in his fuel oil and cinderblock business and on his farm. By the time Thomas entered high school, a segregated Catholic academy in Savannah, he and his brother had learned self-reliance, as well as how to build houses, plant crops, fix machines, and string fences. From this hardscrabble background—where he grew up speaking “Gullah,” or “Geechee,” a southern African-American Creole blend of African languages and Elizabethan English—Thomas made his way to a Missouri Catholic seminary, Holy Cross College, and Yale Law School, shedding Gullah along the way.
Thomas credits his grandfather and the Savannah nuns with everything that he has since achieved, and it does seem that he acquired from them the rock-ribbed fortitude, the energy, and the thick skin that have enabled him to ignore his critics and to revel in his work on the Court. That’s certainly a more plausible psychological inference than one finds in Kevin Merida and Michael Fletcher’s recent Supreme Discomfort, which regards Thomas’s conservative jurisprudence as “payback” for the liberals who tried to “Bork” him....
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The books also told the compelling story of Thomas’s rise from poverty. His taciturn grandfather, Myers Anderson, had abandoned Thomas’s mother when she was a small child, and initially, he wanted nothing to do with young Clarence or his brother. But when Thomas’s mother married a man who didn’t want the boys around, Thomas’s step-grandmother persuaded Anderson to take the boys in, and he raised them, reluctantly, in the small town of Pin Point, Georgia. Anderson did, in his aloof way, come to cherish his grandsons, though he made them work backbreaking hours in his fuel oil and cinderblock business and on his farm. By the time Thomas entered high school, a segregated Catholic academy in Savannah, he and his brother had learned self-reliance, as well as how to build houses, plant crops, fix machines, and string fences. From this hardscrabble background—where he grew up speaking “Gullah,” or “Geechee,” a southern African-American Creole blend of African languages and Elizabethan English—Thomas made his way to a Missouri Catholic seminary, Holy Cross College, and Yale Law School, shedding Gullah along the way.
Thomas credits his grandfather and the Savannah nuns with everything that he has since achieved, and it does seem that he acquired from them the rock-ribbed fortitude, the energy, and the thick skin that have enabled him to ignore his critics and to revel in his work on the Court. That’s certainly a more plausible psychological inference than one finds in Kevin Merida and Michael Fletcher’s recent Supreme Discomfort, which regards Thomas’s conservative jurisprudence as “payback” for the liberals who tried to “Bork” him....