David J. Garrow: You know whom Justice Clarence Thomas really chastises in his new book? Himself.
[David J. Garrow, a senior fellow at Homerton College, University of Cambridge, is the author of Liberty and Sexuality: The Right to Privacy and the Making of Roe v. Wade (1998) and Bearing the Cross (1986), a Pulitzer Prize–winning biography of Martin Luther King Jr.]
Clarence Thomas’ brutally self-critical autobiography, My Grandfather’s Son, bears little resemblance to most early accounts of the book’s contents.
For instance, only at Page 241 — well past the 80 percent mark in a 289-page book — does Thomas reach the subject of Anita Hill’s charges that threw his 1991 Senate confirmation hearings into turmoil. Previous references to Hill as an aide at first the U.S. Department of Education and then the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission foreshadow what’s to come, but except for several derisively critical comments about her job performance, Thomas says nothing new about Hill or her accusations. Indeed, much of Thomas’ account of his angry self-defense at those hearings is drawn directly from his public testimony and little more. Compared to the intensely intimate and emotionally riveting account that Sen. John Danforth, his mentor and close friend, provided in his 1994 book, Resurrection: The Confirmation of Clarence Thomas, Thomas’ own revisiting of that traumatic experience seems terse and restrained.
Yet My Grandfather’s Son is plenty newsworthy, even if initial reviews and commentaries have “missed the lede,” as journalists say when stories fail to highlight what’s most important. In fact, those accounts have missed multiple ledes.
Let’s start with one that’s not all that obvious. Thomas’ son, Jamal — who’s now a 34-year-old options trader for Wachovia Securities in Richmond, Va. — was born while the justice-to-be was a newly married second-year student at Yale Law School. Jamal figures in this memoir most prominently when Thomas describes the subsequent dissolution of that marriage, after which Jamal eventually lived full-time with his father. But Thomas also recounts that, soon after Jamal’s birth, TV news footage of black schoolchildren being bused into the vociferously hostile white neighborhood of South Boston led him to make a remarkable vow: “I swore on the spot never to let Jamal go to a public school.”
Thomas kept his pledge, though in later years his personal finances repeatedly left him scrambling to pay Jamal’s private school tuition bills.
Top public officials need not send their children to public school, but a personal aversion toward public education as intense and long-standing as Thomas’ — apparently irrespective of state, district, or particular school — is a noteworthy attitude for a jurist who regularly confronts cases that present a wide range of public schooling issues. ...
Read entire article at Legal Times
Clarence Thomas’ brutally self-critical autobiography, My Grandfather’s Son, bears little resemblance to most early accounts of the book’s contents.
For instance, only at Page 241 — well past the 80 percent mark in a 289-page book — does Thomas reach the subject of Anita Hill’s charges that threw his 1991 Senate confirmation hearings into turmoil. Previous references to Hill as an aide at first the U.S. Department of Education and then the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission foreshadow what’s to come, but except for several derisively critical comments about her job performance, Thomas says nothing new about Hill or her accusations. Indeed, much of Thomas’ account of his angry self-defense at those hearings is drawn directly from his public testimony and little more. Compared to the intensely intimate and emotionally riveting account that Sen. John Danforth, his mentor and close friend, provided in his 1994 book, Resurrection: The Confirmation of Clarence Thomas, Thomas’ own revisiting of that traumatic experience seems terse and restrained.
Yet My Grandfather’s Son is plenty newsworthy, even if initial reviews and commentaries have “missed the lede,” as journalists say when stories fail to highlight what’s most important. In fact, those accounts have missed multiple ledes.
Let’s start with one that’s not all that obvious. Thomas’ son, Jamal — who’s now a 34-year-old options trader for Wachovia Securities in Richmond, Va. — was born while the justice-to-be was a newly married second-year student at Yale Law School. Jamal figures in this memoir most prominently when Thomas describes the subsequent dissolution of that marriage, after which Jamal eventually lived full-time with his father. But Thomas also recounts that, soon after Jamal’s birth, TV news footage of black schoolchildren being bused into the vociferously hostile white neighborhood of South Boston led him to make a remarkable vow: “I swore on the spot never to let Jamal go to a public school.”
Thomas kept his pledge, though in later years his personal finances repeatedly left him scrambling to pay Jamal’s private school tuition bills.
Top public officials need not send their children to public school, but a personal aversion toward public education as intense and long-standing as Thomas’ — apparently irrespective of state, district, or particular school — is a noteworthy attitude for a jurist who regularly confronts cases that present a wide range of public schooling issues. ...