For years, Supreme Court watchers and civil rights activists have been waiting for the real Clarence Thomas to stand up. In “My Grandfather’s Son: A Memoir” (Harper, 290 pages, $26.95) Mr. Thomas, famously tight-lipped on the bench, finally exhibits, reinvents, and stands up for himself — and his personal brand of contrariness. As he puts it, the book is a “story of an ordinary man to whom extraordinary things happened.” Right he is.

Mr. Thomas was born in 1948 into an America very different from the one that catapulted him to the nation’s highest court in 1991 after only 15 months as a federal appeals judge. Mr. Thomas was raised in severe poverty — first in Pinpoint, Georgia, and, later, on the impoverished side of Savannah — by his mother, who had been abandoned by his father early on. At age 7, Mr. Thomas was sent across town with his younger brother to live instead with his maternal grandfather, Myers Anderson, and grandmother, “Aunt Tina.”

In 1950s Savannah, poverty was stark, and race discrimination seemed to turn every Negro into an invisible man. Except, perhaps, for Mr. Thomas’s grandfather, whom he called “Daddy,” a laborer in a segregated South with only a third grade education who, “despite the hardships he faced… [had] no bitterness or self-pity in his heart.” Mr. Thomas credits his values of self-reliance, focus on individual achievement, and antipathy toward government handouts to his grandfather, who plays a pivotal role in Mr. Thomas’s own development. “Unable to do anything about the racial bigotry and lack of education that had narrowed his own horizons [Daddy] put his hope for the future in ‘my two boys’…” You make your own luck, both men would say.

Nevertheless, Mr. Thomas got some lucky breaks — the first was being saved from the wretched poverty he experienced living with his mother. At Daddy’s and Aunt Tina’s house every morning there were eggs, sausage, bacon, grits, and fresh milk. His grandfather’s self-built house had two bedrooms, a bathroom with a working porcelain toilet, separate living room, dining room, den, and a kitchen replete with a Magic Chef stove, refrigerator, separate freezer, hot water heater, and a Kenmore washer. This “life of luxury” was available to Mr. Thomas and his brother, he writes, “in return for submitting to Daddy’s [his grandfather’s] iron-will.”

Daddy was a strict disciplinarian, and unlike his Baptist relatives, Catholic. He did not like public schools and took pains to make sure that Mr. Thomas and his brother went to Catholic schools, which were then segregated by race. Mr. Thomas was deeply affected by the no-nonsense approach to teaching of his school’s nuns, who administered lessons with corporal punishment whenever Mr. Thomas did not obey them. The nuns preached racial equality, and for that they got the reputation as “the nigger sisters.” Dark-skinned and with a heavy Geechee accent, Mr. Thomas was taunted even by his Negro classmates. The taunt that stung the worst was when the children called him “ABC” — America’s blackest child.”

While an excellent student from grade school through law school, America’s blackest child struggled with several personal demons, including some self-hatred and self-doubt, and constantly reassessed what he believed and wanted to do. All the while, the recurrent dread of being a no-account Negro kept knocking at his door. Whatever milestone he achieved — even after being accepted not just by Yale Law School but Harvard, too — Mr. Thomas was haunted by the warning from Daddy that he’d “probably end up like your no-good daddy or those other no-good Pinpoint Negroes.”

Race was a recurring fixation and source of conflict in his life. During college, he lived in the black corridor of the college dormitory, but only agreed to do so after insisting that a white roommate be allowed to reside there with him. He did not care much for the “forced busing” underway in Boston, thinking that it was “digressive” for blacks to sit next to whites as a precondition of getting a good education. When he later supervised the Office for Civil Rights, Mr. Thomas did everything he could to strengthen black colleges rather than allow them to disappear through the advent of integration.

It is on the use of race as a means of advancing equal opportunity where significant parts of Mr. Thomas’s self-portrait strain credulity. He would like us to believe not just that he believed in self-reliance, but that he lived it; that when he identified himself to Yale Law School for preferential treatment, he was highlighting his marginal economic status rather than his race. And, when he decided against applying to a black college he did so supposedly because he figured he would not pass the paper bag skin-color test, at a time the best black colleges were said to prefer lighter-skinned blacks.

In his own way, Mr. Thomas is a race man — one who identifies with the beleaguered “black race.” Yet, he took great pains to reassure himself that when he got nominated to the Supreme Court his race was not a consideration, despite the fact that he was then to be, and remains, the sole African-American on the high court. The most persistent theme in Mr. Thomas’s discussion of personal choices throughout his life is his preference that he not be stereotyped or treated as anyone’s “Negro” appointee or expected to do “civil rights work.” That, he tells us, was a precondition of his taking jobs as a lawyer and in government in the Reagan and Bush administrations. But what, we wonder, was heading up the Office for Civil Rights, and then the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, other than Negro’s or civil rights work?

Indeed, in significant ways, and on several occasions, Mr. Thomas’s life story reveals a degree of self-contradiction and self-delusion. He went to a predominantly white college, and law school, even as he was not, as he tells us, “prepared to put myself through the emotional strain of attending yet another predominantly white school”; he went to work for Missouri Attorney General, and later Senator, John Danforth, a Republican, though he tells us he “had reflexively disliked most Republicans”; he hired Anita Hill despite his reservations about her snobbishness as a Yale Law School grad, caving into a plea from one of his black friends to do a sister a favor, and while he “had no inclination to date outside my race” he ended up marrying Virginia Bess Lamp, a white labor-relations lobbyist for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

Luck also came in spades, through meetings with an array of people, and value-influencing experiences that opened doors that saved him from a life of marginality and which helped steel Mr. Thomas’s determination to make Daddy proud. Through it all — including the preferences and favors he received from his patrons, opportunities that saved him from a life of marginality — and the luck of being born in America, Mr. Thomas thought of himself as a self-made man and as a natural contrarian, if not curmudgeon.

But this self-image of rugged individualist is a common cover of many race men. Mr. Thomas’s racial rage surfaces tellingly with excruciating honesty in a calculated explosion at the white liberal senators, including Joseph Biden, who had privately assured both Mr. Thomas and his wife that he, Senator Biden, would be Mr. Thomas’s greatest defender if rumors surfaced about his supposedly having sexually harassed Anita Hill. During his confirmation hearing for the High Court, Mr. Thomas lashed out at the senators for having engaged in a high-tech lynching, for their efforts at invading his privacy, prying into the most personal aspects of his life, and for giving credence to malicious rumors about his alleged sexual harassment of Anita Hill when there was not a scintilla of evidence to support such an accusation.

It was a gambit that stopped the lynch party cold, and got Mr. Thomas onto the Supreme Court. The race man played the ultimate race card — he had accused the white Democratic liberal senators of having smeared and attempted to destroy him for being an uppity, non-conformist black. His charge rallied the nation behind him, and sent his nomination to the floor of the Senate.

The rest is history. And now, safe and secure in a lifetime seat, Mr. Thomas has written a tell-all book that names names, blames his enemies, and extols his friends.

“My Grandfather’s Son” is a fascinating and irresistible read. Here is a race man who is able to deconstruct the great racial divide in America — the assumption that one’s skin color can predict anyone’s political or philosophical outlook. The fact that, throughout his career, Mr. Thomas has benefited from racial preferences does not affect his distaste for a system that makes judgments on the basis of race. Whether he benefited from racial preferences or not is immaterial: He is morally correct in disavowing race as a predictor or evaluator of anyone’s — including his own — thinking or viewpoints. Mr. Thomas, like his grandfather, is shouting at his loved ones that being black is not enough; no matter the hardships, there is no time for self-pity.

Mr. Meyers, a former assistant national director of the NAACP, is executive director of the New York Civil Rights Coalition.