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Justice's Book Rips Confirmation 'Mob'

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The Washington Post

Published: September 29, 2007

WASHINGTON - Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas settles scores in an angry and vivid forthcoming memoir, scathingly condemning the media, the Democratic senators who opposed his nomination, and the 'mob' of liberal elites and activist groups who he says desecrated his life.

'My Grandfather's Son,' for which Thomas has received a reported $1.5 million, is a 289-page memoir of his life in rural Georgia, his reliance on religious faith and his rise to the Supreme Court. Thomas, 59, gives a detailed description of the confirmation hearings that electrified the nation in 1991 and the sexual harassment allegations by Anita Hill that he says destroyed his reputation. They are the most extensive comments Thomas has made about Hill since his confirmation.

Thomas writes that Hill was the tool of liberal activist groups 'obsessed' with abortion and outraged because he did not fit their idea of what a black person should believe.

'The mob I now faced carried no ropes or guns,' Thomas writes of his hearings. 'Its weapons were smooth-tongued lies spoken into microphones and printed on the front pages of America's newspapers. ... But it was a mob all the same, and its purpose - to keep the black man in his place - was unchanged.'

'As a child in the Deep South, I'd grown up fearing the lynch mobs of the Ku Klux Klan; as an adult, I was starting to wonder if I'd been afraid of the wrong white people all along,' he writes.

'My worst fears had come to pass not in Georgia, but in Washington, D.C., where I was being pursued not by bigots in white robes but by left-wing zealots draped in flowing sanctimony.'

Thomas writes that he did not watch Hill's televised testimony against him at his Senate Judiciary Committee hearing.

He describes Hill as 'touchy and apt to overreact. If I or anyone else had done the slightest thing to offend her, she would have complained loudly and instantly, not waited for a decade to make her displeasure known.'

He writes that Hill did a 'mediocre' job at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, where he was chairman, and misrepresented herself as a 'devoutly religious Reagan-administration employee.

'In fact, she was a left-winger who'd never expressed any religious sentiments' and had a job in the administration 'because I'd given it to her.'

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