Justice Thomas's Remarks May Impact Race in 2008

Justice Thomas, in his first public statement about the circumstances leading to his appointment to the Supreme Court, said he became the target of a political smear campaign because of his presumed beliefs about abortion and because, as a conservative African-American, he was thought to have betrayed his roots.

The vehemence of his contention that he was made the victim of false allegations to keep him from joining the court, and the clarity of his statements about the propensity for black Americans to paint themselves, and agree to be painted, as victims, is certain to raise the issue of race in a presidential election contest in which for the first time one of the front-runners, Senator Obama, is an African-American.

Justice Thomas's remarks also will bring to the fore the complexion of the Supreme Court as a potent election issue. The suggestion by Justice Thomas, an appointee of President George H.W. Bush, that the future of Roe v. Wade was behind opposition to his Supreme Court candidacy confirms that the future direction of the court — and the future of legal abortions — will depend on who is elected in November 2008.

In an extended interview on CBS News's "60 Minutes," broadcast last night and tonight, to accompany his memoir, "My Grandfather's Son," out today, Justice Thomas explained why he believes he was accused of sexual harassment by a female colleague, Anita Hill. "The issue was abortion," he said.

He fiercely defended his description of the Senate confirmation hearings, at which Ms. Hill presented her allegations, as "a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves."

"If someone just wantonly tries to destroy you, if somebody comes in and drags you out of your house, and beats the hell out of you, what is it? … I think most well meaning people understand it for what it was. It was a weapon to destroy me, clear and simple," he said.

Asked whether his opponents leveled the sex charge because of his attitude to Roe v. Wade, the 1973 test case that deems abortion to be legal, Justice Thomas replied: "I have no idea what they thought. But they knew one thing: They weren't in charge of me. So I wasn't going to do their bidding."

He refused to be drawn into answering whether his opponents were right to believe that he is an opponent of Roe v. Wade. He said he does have "concern" for those facing "tough choices" about abortion, but he said his personal views have little to do with how he considers cases coming before the court.

"You do have that concern," he said. "But none of that had anything to do with what's in the Constitution. The point is simply this: The Constitution is what matters, not my personal views, whatever they may be. And I don't go around expressing them on that issue."

He said the Anita Hill he knew as a co-worker was very different from the woman he saw testify against him in the Senate. "She was not the demure, religious, conservative person that they portrayed," he said. "That's not the person I knew. … She could defend herself, let's just put it that way. And she did not take slights very kindly. And anyone who did anything, she responded very quickly."

Asked whether it would have taken Ms. Hill, as he had known her, 10 years before making a charge of sexual harassment — the time she waited before accusing him — Justice Thomas replied, "It didn't take 10 minutes."

At one point in the interview, Justice Thomas held back tears as he remembered the warnings his grandfather gave him about showing his sexual feelings: "As we entered puberty, it was constant, and I remember the day he said, ‘Boy, you up in age now. Don't you ever look a white woman in the eye.'"

Justice Thomas said he had hoped to become a Catholic priest but left the seminary when, on the day Martin Luther King Jr. was shot dead, he was confronted with racist beliefs that changed his views forever. A fellow student said: "‘Well, that's good. I hope the S.O.B. dies.' And that was it. That was the end of seminary. That was the end of the vocation. That was the end of, for all practical purposes, my Catholic faith."

His response was intense anger, which almost led him to join the Black Panther movement. "I was angry at the church because the church wasn't aggressively pointing out how immoral racism was," he said. "I was upset with my grandfather because he didn't understand what I was going through. I was upset with the country because of the bigotry. … I was upset at the — probably the submissiveness of blacks in putting up with bigotry. This was the era when you had the black power movement and that was enticing, it was liberating."

Justice Thomas described the process of disillusionment that led him to conclude that affirmative action, though introduced through good intentions, was a sham. Having been granted a place at Yale University, notwithstanding his lack of resources and the color of his skin, he ultimately felt his degree to have been instantly devalued.

"It was converted to, ‘Well, you're here because you're black.' … That degree meant one thing for whites and another thing for blacks," he said. He said he does not display his degree proudly; it is kept in the basement of his house, where it gathers dust, discarded.
He responded tetchily when asked by CBS's Steve Kroft whether, as is often leveled against him, he does not care enough for African-Americans. "How much does Justice Scalia care about Italians? Did you ask him that? Did anyone ever ask him? Give me a break," he said.

Asked whether the grueling public attention he endured at the time of his confirmation hearings was worth it, he said he thought it was. "I think it was always worth it to stand on principle. No matter what the ultimate goal is. Wrong is wrong, even if it was over a penny," he said.