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Clarence Thomas (born June 23, 1948) is an American lawyer and jurist who serves as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. He was nominated by President George H. W. Bush to succeed Thurgood Marshall and has served since 1991. After Marshall, Thomas is the second African American to serve on the Supreme Court and has been its longest-serving member since Anthony Kennedy's retirement in 2018. Since Stephen Breyer's retirement in 2022, he is also the Court's oldest member. Thomas was born in Pin Point, Georgia. After his father abandoned the family, he was raised by his grandfather in a poor Gullah community near Savannah. Growing up as a devout Catholic, Thomas originally intended to be a priest in the Catholic Church but was frustrated over the church's insufficient attempts to combat racism. He abandoned his aspiration of becoming a clergyman to attend the College of the Holy Cross and Yale Law School, where he was influenced by a number of conservative authors, notably Thomas Sowell. Upon graduating, he was appointed as an assistant attorney general in Missouri and later entered private practice there. He became a legislative assistant to U.S. Senator John Danforth in 1979, and was made Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Education in 1981. President Ronald Reagan appointed Thomas as Chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) the next year. President George H. W. Bush nominated Thomas to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in 1990. He served in that role for 19 months before filling Marshall's seat on the Supreme Court. Thomas's confirmation hearings were bitter and intensely fought, centering on an accusation that he had sexually harassed Anita Hill, a subordinate at the Department of Education and the EEOC. Hill alleged that Thomas made multiple inappropriate sexual and romantic overtures to her; Thomas and his supporters alleged that Hill and her political supporters had fabricated the accusation to prevent the appointment of a black conservative. The Senate confirmed Thomas by a vote of 52–48, the narrowest margin in a century. Since the death of Antonin Scalia, Thomas has been the Court's foremost originalist, stressing the original meaning in interpreting the Constitution. In contrast to Scalia—who had been the only other consistent originalist—he pursues a more classically liberal variety of originalism. Thomas was known for his silence during most oral arguments, though has since begun asking more questions to counsel. He is notable for his majority opinions in Good News Club v. Milford Central School (determining the freedom of religious speech in relation to the First Amendment) and New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen (affirming the individual right to bear arms outside the home), as well as his dissent in Gonzales v. Raich (arguing that Congress may not criminalize the private cultivation of medical marijuana). He is widely considered to be the Court's most conservative member. Early life Thomas was born on June 23, 1948, in his parents' wooden shack in Pin Point, Georgia. Pin Point was a small community near Savannah founded by freedmen in the 1880s. He was the second of three children of M.C. Thomas, a farm worker, and Leola Williams. Williams had been born out of wedlock; after her mother's death, she was sent from Liberty County, Georgia, to live with an aunt in Pin Point. The family were descendants of enslaved people and spoke Gullah as a first language. Thomas's earliest known ancestors were slaves named Sandy and Peggy, who were born in the late 18th century and owned by wealthy planter Josiah Wilson of Liberty County. Thomas's older sister, Emma, was born in 1946, and his younger brother, Myers, in 1949. Upon becoming pregnant with Thomas's older sister, Leola was expelled from her Baptist church and dropped out of high school after the 10th grade; her father ordered her to marry M.C. in January 1947. After three years of marriage, M.C. sued for divorce, claiming that Leola neglected the children, and a judge granted the request in March 1951. After the divorce, M.C. moved to Savannah and later Pennsylvania, visiting his children only once. Leola went to work as a maid in Savannah during the week and returned to Pin Point on the weekends. Custody of the children was awarded to Leola's aunt. When her aunt's house burned down in 1955, Leola took her children to live with her in the room she rented in a tenement with an outdoor toilet in Savannah, leaving her daughter with the aunt in Pin Point. She asked her father, Myers Anderson, for help. He initially refused but agreed after his wife threatened to throw him out.Thomas and his brother went to live with Anderson, his maternal grandfather, in 1955 and experienced amenities such as indoor plumbing and regular meals for the first time. Despite having little formal education, Anderson had built a successful business delivering coal, oil, and ice. When racial unrest led to widespread protest and marches in Savannah from 1960 to 1963, Anderson used his wealth to bail out demonstrators and took his grandchildren to meetings promoted by the NAACP. Thomas has described his grandfather as the person who has influenced his life the most. Anderson converted to Catholicism and sent Thomas to be educated at a series of Catholic schools. Thomas attended the predominantly black St. Pius X High School in Chatham County for two years before transferring to St. John Vianney's Minor Seminary on the Isle of Hope, where he was the segregated boarding school's first black student. Though he experienced hazing, he performed well academically. He spent many hours at the Carnegie Library, the only library for Blacks in Savannah before libraries were desegregated in 1961. When Thomas was ten years old, Anderson began putting his grandsons to work during the summers, helping him build a house on a plot of farmland he owned, building fences, and doing farm work. He believed in hard work and self-reliance, never showed his grandsons affection, beat them frequently according to Leola, and impressed the importance of a good education on them. Anderson taught Thomas that "all of our rights as human beings came from God, not man", and that racial segregation was a violation of divine law. Education During his freshman year from 1967 to 1968, Thomas attended Conception Seminary College, a Benedictine seminary in Missouri, with the intent to become a priest; no one in Thomas's family had attended college before. After Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination, he overheard a fellow student say, "Good. I hope the son of a bitch dies" and "[t]hat's what they should do to all the niggers". The display of racism moved Thomas to leave the seminary. He thought the church did not do enough to combat racism and resolved to abandon the priesthood. He left at the end of the semester. At a nun's suggest.... Discover the James B Staab popular books. Find the top 100 most popular James B Staab books.