Created Equal

Clarence Thomas in His Own Words

Michael Pack, Mark Paoletta, Michael Pack, Mark Paoletta

• Publisher: Regnery
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781684513109
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: American Government
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Drawing on historical documents and exclusive interviews, authors tell the inspiring story of Clarence Thomas's rise from a childhood of poverty and prejudice in the segregated South to Supreme Court Justice. Companion to blockbuster documentary Created Equal: Clarence Thomas inHis Own Words, but a fascinating stand alone read, as well! *The full story behind the wildly successful documentary film, Created Equal: Clarence Thomas in His Own Words* Born into dire poverty in the segregated South and abandoned by his father as a child, Justice Clarence Thomas triumphed over seemingly insurmountable odds to become one of the most influential justices on the Supreme Court. Yet after three decades of honorable service, few know him beyond his contentious confirmation and the surrounding media firestorm. Who is Justice Clarence Thomas, in his own words? In the follow-up to the wildly successful documentary by the same name, Created Equal builds on dozens of hours of groundbreaking, one-on-one interviews with Thomas to share a new, expanded account of his powerful story for the first time. Producer Michael Pack and Mark Paoletta, a lawyer who worked alongside Thomas during his confirmation, dive deep into the Justice's story. Drawing on a rich array of historical documents and unreleased conversations with Thomas, his wife, and those who knew him best, Created Equal is a timeless account of faith, race, power, and personal resilience.

CHAPTER ONE CHILDHOOD YEARS

“They had faith in this country”

MP (Michael Pack): Justice Thomas, what are the lessons of your life, when you look back over it?

CT (Clarence Thomas): I don’t consider myself someone who reflects on that stuff a lot. We tend to make life pretty complicated. Poor people don’t have that luxury. They can’t start debating the number of angels on a pinhead. No offense to St. Thomas Aquinas, but they can’t be Thomistic. Things are simplified. They are not gray. They’re black and white. You either fed the hogs or you didn’t. You fed the chickens or you didn’t. You repaired the roof or you didn’t. You put the fodder or hay in the barn or you didn’t. Whether you did it or didn’t do it makes the difference between survival and not surviving. So that’s something my grandfather taught us. There was always right and wrong.

I went off to school and I took all sorts of philosophy and took history, took theology. You read, you thought about things. Later in life, I was thinking back on my life, and I thought after all of that, the person who had the greatest influence and probably the most accurate was Sister Mary Dolorosa in the second grade in 1955 as we were beginning the Baltimore Catechism.¹ She would say, “Why did God create us?” And the answer was pretty uniform—a whole group of second graders answered in unison: “God created us to know, love, and serve him in this life and be happy with him in the next.” So that’s pretty simple. After all the existentialism, having studied metaphysics, nihilists, you’ve been through all these, and you come back to Sister Mary Dolorosa and the second grade in September 1955.

It seemed to me in a lot of ways that life was a circle that you started in one place, went away, and came back.

MP: To your grandfather’s values, to the nuns’ values after a journey away from them?

CT: In my youth, there are still freed slaves around, alive. They’re elderly, very, very old, but they’re still alive. So, that’s the world that you’re bridging. These people had a faith in the future and in a set of values that you needed, to pursue that unknown future. But there’s a way you had to conduct yourself. They had faith; they had hope; and they had charity. They were kind to each other. They were a community. They had hope in the future. That’s why my grandparents invested so much in us.

They had faith in this country and that if they did the right things, it would all work out, even though they could not see the progress. And that’s where hope comes in. I mean, think about it: you’re uneducated people in Georgia during very difficult times. And yet they still had faith, hope, and charity. Compare that to today and how many people actually convey any of those virtues to you? They convey, “Oh we all need to have a sense of community,” that sort of thing, but that’s not quite charity in any case.

There are lots of lessons that were learned. And there was always an honesty. People were always honest with us. I mean, there was a trust. You can think of today and contrast it. From the house I grew up in, it is three quarters of a mile almost exactly from my school, St. Benedict’s.² Imagine a kid that’s quite a bit under a hundred pounds, and in the pre-dawn time frame walking to serve the 6:00 Mass at the convent there. And my biggest fear was stray dogs; not being robbed or molested or abducted. Stray dogs. Now how many kids today would be allowed to walk the inner-city streets in the dark, or any time for that matter, at the age of seven, eight, nine, ten? We walked to school every day, and no one ever bothered us, an occasional bully or something, but that was a part of life. But there was a trust. And my grandparents had a faith and a belief and trust in the community that nothing would happen to you, that it was perfectly safe.

PIN POINT

“WE WERE THOSE PEOPLE BACK UP IN THE WOODS”

MP: Justice Thomas, let’s try to retrace your journey, starting at the beginning. How did your people end up in Pin Point?³

CT: As best we can tell, our forebears were brought over in the mid-eighteenth century, and more precisely, some people think it was in the 1760s, to Ossabaw Island, which is one of the barrier islands.⁴ Some members of my family were on that island for more than a century and came to the landward side after that. My grandfather is from the landward side in Liberty County. As far as we know, virtually all of my family members were in that region.

MP: What was Pin Point like?

CT: Pin Point is hard to describe because it’s kind of gone away. People would have said back then, “We were those people back up in the woods.” We were isolated. It was a community. It wasn’t a town. You could see the river from there. You hear of the song, “Moon River”? Johnny Mercer’s from Savannah.⁵

It was close to Savannah but in a sense far away. There was one way out; it was a dirt road. All your family members were there. You played, you ran, you knew everybody. For me it was idyllic, but it was isolated, and I didn’t know how isolated it was until years later.

MP: What does it mean to be Gullah Geechee?⁶

CT: What does it mean to be Gullah Geechee? You know, I never thought about it when I was a kid. It was just a distinctive culture, West African. It had a mixture of English and other words that was somewhat difficult to understand. The closest thing I can think of today would be if you went to the Caribbean. The dialects are close, or if I saw someone from West Africa, the accents are close to what I grew up with. Back when I was a kid, to be called Geechee was a put down. It would be years later that they would begin to celebrate it.

MP: Tell me about when you were born, a little about your mother, and your other siblings.

CT: I was born at home, right on Shipyard Creek in 1948. My mother always said I was too stubborn to cry. And I guess that was sort of an indication of the person I would be. Ms. Lula Kemp, the midwife, came over from another little community, Sandfly, and brought me into this world, and that was June 23, 1948.

I am a middle child. My mother had had all of us, we think, before she was twenty. She was not educated. And then she and my father separated when I was a toddler. So I would have no early memories of him. I have memories of other family members but he wasn’t there—he wasn’t among the family members.

MP: What was growing up in Pin Point like?

CT: Our home was just a shack. No one had running water. You had a woodstove in the kitchen, you had kerosene lamps for illumination, and I still have a memory of one light bulb in the living room area. And of course, if there was a hole in the wall people covered it up with different things. They used newspaper or old catalogue pages.

But for us it was home, and it was well kept. I always remember on Saturdays, which was always a big day, because people cleaned and cooked and prepared themselves for the Lord’s Day. It was really a big deal. So you would have to rake the front yard. Well, the front yard didn’t have any grass. It was just dirt, and it was always interesting to see how neatly people would rake. And you see the marks of the rake in the front yard in an area that was not grass. It was just dirt. That’s just how fastidious people were about keeping things up even though the house itself was not something you would consider an elegant house. And the rule was: well, it’s yours, you have to do your best.

People raked oysters and they caught crabs and they fished. The women picked crab, people like my mother and my relatives did that at the crab factory, which was just there in Pin Point. And they also shucked oysters—all of which is hard work and requires a lot of manual labor and dexterity and standing up.

Well, when they were gone we were on our own. We were off on our adventures. We would catch minnows in the creek. We’d walk along the water’s edge throwing oyster shells. If you sail an oyster shell you can make it skip on the water. And so then we would see who could make it skip the most.

Most people didn’t have store-bought toys. So you made them. You made pluffers which was a weapon we made. Chinaberry, you would put it in a bamboo tube and you create a vacuum and push the berries through and made a popping sound. And then we would have a war with each other. The rims from old bicycles were also a great source of fun. You would take the rims and we would take a stick and you get all the spokes out and you would push it along the dirt road with a stick in the groove.

We would roll tires. In those days you had lots of old tires that had gone bad. If you go back to the movie To Kill a Mockingbird, Scout, the young girl, when she is pushed into Boo Radley’s yard, she’s in a tire.⁷ I have no idea how kids today can have any idea what they were doing with her inside a tire. We always did that. Inside the opening in the tire where the rim would normally go and you’re rolling down the road inside a tire. Well, if someone lets that go downhill, you could wind up rolling into somebody’s yard or down into the river.

We connected old cans and made what we called trains with coat hangers and things like that. But you name it, we did it. I remember years later reading Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer and wondering what the fuss was about. We had done a lot of those things.

MP: As you tell it, it does sound idyllic.

CT: There was always plenty to eat. You lived on the water, so that was a cornucopia. Some people made turtle stew. It was called kudda. They’d have raccoon or some people ate possum. There was lots of fish. They made conch. Someone killed a deer. Someone killed a wild hog. Someone came back with a big flounder, someone went way out and got whiting or mullets. So there was always lots of food. Now you may not like the way it was fixed. You may not like that particular food, but there was always lots of food. And it was peaceful.

When I was six years old, in those days the schools were still segregated. The school that blacks in Pin Point attended for grammar school was called Haven Home, which doesn’t exist anymore. You went to the head of Pin Point, and you walked down the road and the bus came, and it was exciting to be big enough to go to the first grade. And the first day of school in those days was a huge event. All my cousins were there. It wasn’t like you were going with a bunch of strangers. It was like a family outing for the kids. There were all your relatives there. It was safe. It was my complete world.

MOVING TO SAVANNAH

“THAT IS THE WORST PLACE I’VE EVER LIVED”

MP: Why did you and your family leave Pin Point?

CT: The house burned down. One day I came home, someone said there had been a fire, and we get there and this little shack that we had all been living in was just ashes and twisted tin. Everything that you ever knew in life is just there. I mean it’s smoldering. I had lived in that house in Pin Point with my mother’s Aunt Annie until that house burned down in the winter of 1954.

They left my sister [Emma Mae] in Pin Point with Annie. She was the oldest. My brother was five years old and I was six. We went to Savannah to live with my mother who was working as a maid.

My mother lived in one room in an old tenement with an outdoor bathroom. That is the worst place I’ve ever lived.

Whenever you flushed the toilet, or someone else flushed, it didn’t actually go in the sewer system—it went in somebody else’s yard. My all-encompassing word is gross. I mean, it was putrid. It was the smell of raw sewage. There were these boards, people would make these sort of makeshift paths to get across the gross wetness in the backyard.

We lived upstairs and one of our chores on the weekend was to empty the chamber pot in the outdoor toilet. In the summer in 1955, I was carrying the chamber pot down and had a significant amount of stale urine in it. I tripped at the top of the stairs and I fell all the way down. And then the pot and its content emptying out followed me and then washed me. It underscored all that had happened moving from Pin Point to the west side of Savannah.

And so you had the contrast between rural poverty, which is what we had in Pin Point and which was very livable. Then you had urban squalor and that was horrible.

I was supposed to go to school in the afternoons in those days and my mother wasn’t there to make me go, because she had to go to work, so I wandered the streets by myself. I was six. That was a hard year. You were hungry and didn’t know when you’d eat, and cold and didn’t know when you’d be warm again. My mother didn’t have money for kerosene. We had a kerosene stove in the room but there was never any kerosene so it was just whatever the weather was outside is what you got inside. She and my brother slept on the bed, and I slept on a little chair that was too small.

WALKING TO HIS GRANDPARENTS’ HOME

“THE LONGEST AND MOST SIGNIFICANT JOURNEY I EVER MADE”

MP: In 1955, you moved to live with your grandparents. How and why did that happen?

CT: My mother had difficulty with two little boys and working as a maid which required some unevenness in her hours because not only was she cleaning, she was raising other peoples’ kids. So that meant babysitting and things like that. So she asked my grandparents for help. And my grandmother, who did not have children, she was my mother’s stepmother, suggested that she let her raise these two boys.

And one day, one Saturday morning we woke up and my mother said, “Put all your things in the grocery bag,” and remember the paper grocery bags in those days, and my brother took one and neither one was full. All of our items, just imagine everything you have, in less than a paper bag. So we took our grocery bag each, and walked the couple of blocks from Henry Lane to East Thirty-Second Street.

That was the longest and most significant journey I ever made because it changed my entire life. And that walk along East Broad Street was a walk that I would replicate literally hundreds of times in the years after that. But I would always remember the first walk.

And that’s how we went to live with my grandparents.

MP: What happened on the other end when you showed up to your grandparents’ house?

CT: My grandfather was this myth. We saw him maybe once or twice when we lived on the west side. He was very stern. And he sat us there at the kitchen table and he said, “Boys, the damn vacation is over.” He said from then on ...