his memoir ‘‘My Grandfather’s Son.’’ But the
relationship was often fractious. Anderson,
who donated to the National Association for
the Advancement of Colored People, ‘‘wasn’t
happy with his grandson’s choices,’’ Kevin Meri-
da, now the executive editor of The Los Angeles
Times, and Michael A. Fletcher wrote in a 2007
biography, ‘‘Supreme Discomfort.’’ The authors
quoted Ketanji Brown Jackson, a Black former
clerk for Justice Stephen Breyer whom Biden is
now considering for the vacancy being created
by Breyer’s retirement. She remembered sitting
across from Thomas at lunch and thinking: ‘‘ ‘I
don’t understand you. You sound like my par-
ents. You sound like people I grew up with.’ But
the lessons he tended to draw from the expe-
riences of the segregated South seemed to be
diff erent than those of everybody I know.’’
Clarence and Ginni met in 1986 at a conference
on affi rmative action, which they both opposed.
After a stint at the civil rights offi ce of the Educa-
tion Department, he was running the E.E.O.C.; she
was an attorney at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce
and mused that year to Good Housekeeping about
someday running for Congress. She had extracted
herself from a New Age-y self-help group called
Life spring, which she would denounce as a cult,
but was still attending meetings held by a cult-
deprogramming organization, and she took him
along to one. He would describe her as a ‘‘gift
from God,’’ and they married in 1987 at a Meth-
odist church in Omaha; it was her fi rst marriage,
his second. ‘‘There’s no other way to politely say
this, but the fact she married a Black man must’ve
caused an uproar in that family, I can’t even imag-
ine,’’ said Scott Bange, who dated Ginni in high
school. In 1991, one of Ginni Thomas’s aunts told
The Washington Post that the future justice ‘‘was
so nice, we forgot he was Black,’’ adding, ‘‘He
treated her so well, all of his other qualities made
up for his being Black.’’
Thomas had custody of a teenage son, Jamal,
from his previous marriage to Kathy Ambush, his
college girlfriend. For several years, the couple
also raised his great- nephew, Mark Martin. Jamal
Thomas, who did not return requests for com-
ment, has spoken warmly, if rarely, of his father
on Facebook, writing in a 2015 Father’s Day post:
‘‘Dad showed me that you can enjoy all sorts of
music. His album collection is legendary. Country,
R&B, Classical, Blues, Gospel, Jazz, and yes, even
Culture Club. But I kind of compare that to his
ability to relate and connect with anyone.’’
Together, the Thomases considered them-
selves happy warriors. If he was estranged
in some ways from his own upbringing, he
embraced her world, and even became an ardent
fan of the Nebraska Cornhuskers. ‘‘They have this
happy- kindness, Nebraska thing going on,’’ one
longtime friend of the couple’s said. ‘‘Ginni can
be annoying and obnoxious with the happy talk,but when you’re with her one on one, she can
be very kind. And with Clarence too, there’s a
kindness too; it’s not just the manipulative happy
talk. But there’s an underbelly of pain, and they
turn it against other people.’’Clarence Thomas has always maintained that
he had to be talked into accepting an appoint-
ment to the Court of Appeals for the District
of Columbia Circuit when he was nominatedas a federal judge in 1989. ‘‘I was minding my
business,’’ he said, recounting the story in his
remarks at the Heritage celebration. He was
championed by Danforth, by then a senator,
who said on the Senate fl oor: ‘‘I hope that peo-
ple would not attack Clarence Thomas because
of some stereotype of what they think a Black
lawyer should believe.’’
Thurgood Marshall announced his retirement
from the Supreme Court in 1991, and President
George H.W. Bush turned to Thomas. His con-
fi rmation hearings, presided over by Joe Biden,
then the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Com-
mittee, began with an attempt to determine
his views on Roe v. Wade. Then, after an F.B.I.
report was leaked, Anita Hill, a law professor
who worked under Thomas at the Department
of Education and the E.E.O.C., testifi ed that he
made numerous unwelcome advances, persist-
ed in workplace conversations about his ‘‘sexual
prowess,’’ described graphic pornography and
said he found a pubic hair on a cola can and
asked who had put it there. The future justice
fl atly rejected the allegations, calling the public
inquiry ‘‘a high-tech lynching for uppity Blacks
who in any way deign to think for themselves, to
do for themselves, to have diff erent ideas.’’
Asked during the hearing whether he wanted
to withdraw, he said, ‘‘I’d rather die.’’ He did not
watch Hill’s testimony. ‘‘I was the one that tried to
watch what was going on for as long as I could,’’
Ginni Thomas said in a 2020 documentary onJustice Thomas’s life and legal philosophy, ‘‘Cre-
ated Equal,’’ made with the Thomases’ partici-
pation and funded by the far-right Charles Koch
and Bradley Foundations. ‘‘It was all so wrong,’’
she continued. ‘‘It was so untrue.’’ When Biden
informed Thomas in a phone call that he would
vote against him, he tried to reassure him about
the process. As she listened in, Ginni Thomas
took a spoon from a kitchen drawer and pretend-
ed to gag herself, her husband later recounted.(Biden was also criticized for excluding testimo-
ny favorable to Hill and, much later, expressed
regret.) Friends and associates said that the cou-
ple’s rage over the confi rmation battle came to
both defi ne and unify them.
‘‘He was in a state of shock,’’ said Armstrong
Williams, a Black conservative pundit and long-
time friend of Justice Thomas’s, who worked
for him at the E.E.O.C. and served as an adviser
during the hearings. ‘‘Everything that he ever
worked so hard for, everything that his grand-
parents and his mother were proud of him for,
was reduced to sexual innuendos. And no one
knew anything about his career except for those
innuendos. The fi rst time people were hearing
about him were these salacious allegations.’’ And
so, Williams said, ‘‘he threw himself into the court
and becoming the best justice he could be, and
that still remains his refuge.’’
Thomas’s early years on the court were dis-
tinguished by vigorous dissents and iconoclas-
tic opinions. While some justices seek a narrow
enough argument to garner fi ve votes, he often
staked out a lonelier, more oppositional role as a
dissenter. In a 1997 Second Amendment case, he
opened the door for future challenges to local gun
laws. In a 2000 Nebraska abortion case, he assailed
Roe v. Wade, which he called ‘‘grievously wrong.’’
‘‘He was tilling the ground,’’ said Leonard Leo,
a former executive vice president of the Federal-
ist Society, a Council for National Policy member
and a close family friend ofThe New York Times Magazine 37Photograph by Oliver Contreras/Redux, for The New York Times
‘WHEN YOU LOOK AT THE
IMPACT ON THE CONSERVATIVE
MOVEMENT AND THE
PRINCIPLES WE HOLD DEAR,
I THINK HER AND
HER HUSBAND
STAND TOE TO TOE.’
(Continued on Page 48)