I don’t generally read autobiographies of contemporary figures, but after watching his interview on 60 Minutes last month, I was compelled to read Justice Clarence Thomas’ autobiography, My Grandfather’s Son
And I’m glad that I did, because it’s one of the best books I’ve read in quite awhile.
Clarence Thomas’s story is one that should be an inspiration to all Americans regardless of race, religion, or gender. Here is a man, a black man, who was born in the poorest part of Georgia in an era when Jim Crow still reigned supreme. He was born into a single-parent family — his father having abandoned his mother early on — and lived for a time in some of the most excruciating, heart-wrenching, conditions of poverty conceivable in modern America.
And yet he succeeded. He excelled in high school, graduated college, and graduated from one of the most prominent law schools in the country. Eventually he went on to a well-regarded career in the government and then found himself standing next to the President of the United States on a summer day in 1991 being nominated to the Supreme Court of the United States. That should have been a day to make all Americans proud, instead it was the beginning of one of the most despicable Supreme Court nomination processes in history.
I felt that way about the Thomas hearings when I was watching them as a law student back in 1991, but, after reading the story of Thomas’ life before those days, it makes the outrage of what happened to him back them all the more palpable.
But the Anita Hill fiasco only comprises 20 pages out of a nearly 300 page book, and it is hardly the most compelling part of the story of Justice Thomas’ life.
Thomas tells a story of his rebellion against the one person who had taught him the most, his grandfather, his flirtation with black radicalism in the 1960s, an unsuccessful marriage, and even struggles with obvious depression and alcoholism. And he doesn’t hold anything back when he’s talking about the depths to which he’d sunk before realizing that the key to turning things around was returning to the values he’d learned as child.
It’s a story that should be compelling regardless of your political affiliation, and regardless of what you think of Clarence Thomas as a Supreme Court Justice. It’s the story of a man who overcame desperate poverty and racism to achieve something that only 105 Americans before him had done.
And it’s a story worth reading.
October 25th, 2007 at 4:13 pm
You are incredibly naive.
That or you are flat out stupid.
Which one is it tardo?
October 25th, 2007 at 5:03 pm
Barbara,
Based on your comment I’d say its clear that I’m not the one who is a glittering jewel of colossal ignorance.
December 4th, 2007 at 4:41 pm
[...] in October, I reviewed Justice Clarence Thomas’s autobiography, My Grandfather’s Son and said the following: [...]