in 1973 that a little group in Omaha, Nebraska,
decided that they would rescind Nebraska’s rat-
ifi cation of the Equal Rights Amendment, and it
was just about half a dozen of them, but Ginni’s
mother was in that group,’’ she added, calling it
‘‘a real turning point in our long battle’’ against
the amendment, which the forum said would not
‘‘celebrate womanhood’’ but ‘‘erase it.’’
‘‘And then later on,’’ Schlafl y continued, ‘‘after
the feminists moved on to another goal, after we
beat them on E.R.A., they took up the goal of com-
parable worth’’ — a reference to a largely unsuc-
cessful movement in the 1980s to require equal
pay for men and women, which Schlafl y called ‘‘an
eff ort to give us wage and price control.’’
‘‘Ginni was then with the Chamber of Com-
merce, and she was a great help in that, and now
she is a major assistant for our good friend Dick
Armey,’’ Schlafl y said, referring to the Republi-
can congressman from Texas who was then the
House majority leader. ‘‘So, Ginni, stand up. We
appreciate your being with us tonight.’’
Virginia Thomas is the daughter of a president
of a Nebraska architecture fi rm; the well-to-do
family had two houses, one in Omaha and one
in a nearby lakeside development called Ginger
Cove that her father built. Ginni Lamp, as she
was known then, was on a cheer squad for taller
girls known as the Squires, brandishing a sword
and a shield before football games. ‘‘She would
march in front with that; she loved doing that,’’
said Sue Norby, a classmate. ‘‘My other friends
were on the pompom squad because they were
so short, but Ginni was on a diff erent squad
because she was tall, with other tall girls. She
was the warrior woman.’’
Ginni’s mother, Marjorie Lamp, was an out-
spoken Republican activist and became a tow-
ering fi gure in her daughter’s life. When Schlafl y
lost a bid to become president of the National
Federation of Republican Women in 1967, Mar-
jorie Lamp withdrew from the organization and
called the voting ‘‘rigged.’’ She ran unsuccessful-
ly for the Nebraska Legislature in 1972 and was
a 1976 Reagan delegate, railing against Gerald
Ford’s lack of leadership; ‘‘Reagan people are
more hard-core,’’ she once said. She warned in
a local paper that if Jimmy Carter was elected,
‘‘we’d be heading toward socialism.’’ Demo-
crats, she wrote in a 1983 letter to The Lincoln
Journal Star, ‘‘almost brought our great country
to its knees with their wild spending policies.’’
Ginni Thomas has underscored her parents’
resolve in her own remarks. ‘‘Our family didn’t
believe Nixon did anything wrong in Watergate
until way after he admitted guilt,’’ she once said.
‘‘We believed any Republican until all the evi-
dence was in, and then a little more.’’ She joined
her high school’s Republican club in 1974, the
year it started, and she and her mother attend-
ed the 1976 Republican National Convention
together. It was her mother, she would later say,
who ‘‘modeled conservative political feminism
for her daughters.’’ She attended Creighton Uni-
versity in Omaha and earned her law degree
there while working for a Nebraska congress-
man, Hal Daub, the fi rst of a string of political
jobs that took her far from Omaha.
Clarence Thomas’s journey to Washington
was far diff erent. He grew up in poverty, fi rst in
Pin Point, Ga., a tiny enclave, now part of Savan-
nah, that was established by formerly enslaved
Black people after the Civil War. He and his
mother and brother then moved to Savannah
itself — his father left the family when he was
2 — and he was largely raised by an exceedingly
strict and temperamental grandfather.
For the future justice, conservatism was part
of an ideological journey, much of it forged at
College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass.,
where he was among a small group of Black
men that did the diffi cult work of integrating
the institution in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
He and other students, including the promi-
nent defense attorney Ted Wells, started a Black
Student Union, and for a time Thomas protest-
ed the Vietnam War. A pivotal
moment came after a demonstra-
tion in Cambridge, Mass., turned
into ‘‘a full-scale riot,’’ he wrote in
his memoir. ‘‘Horrifi ed,’’ he reject-
ed what he saw as a posture of
anger and resentment and threw
himself into his studies.‘‘Just about every evening, a few minutes after
11, there Clarence would be coming through
the door from the library, every single evening,’’
recalled Edward P. Jones, the Pulitzer Prize-
winning fi ction writer known for his work chron-
icling Black lives in Washington, who lived down
the hall from Thomas as a sophomore. ‘‘There was
a fi erce determination I sensed from him, that he
was going to get as much as he could and get as
far, ultimately, as he could.’’
Thomas got his law degree from Yale but
stuck a 15-cent cigar sticker to the frame of his
diploma after failing to get a big law job — such
fi rms, he would write, attributed his academic
pedigree to preferential treatment. Instead, he
took the only job off er he received and went to
work for Missouri’s Republican attorney gen-
eral, John Danforth, and discovered the writ-
ings of the Black conservative Thomas Sowell,
who assailed affi rmative action as undercutting
self- reliance; Thomas wrote that he ‘‘felt like a
thirsty man gulping down a glass of cool water’’
to see his own beliefs articulated. A few years
later, after he was appointed by Reagan to head
the Equal Employment Opportunity Commis-
sion, he would complain that
Black civil rights leaders ‘‘bitch,
bitch, bitch, moan and moan,
whine and whine.’’
Thomas venerated his grandfa-
ther, Myers Anderson, who was as
infl uential in his life as his wife’s
mother was in hers, and titled36 2.27.22
Clarence Thomas
administering the
Constitutional Oath to the
newest Supreme Court
justice, Amy Coney Barrett,
on Oct. 26, 2020, as
her husband, Jesse Barrett,
and President Donald
J. Trump look on.