Clarence Thomas grew up speaking Gullah before rising to the Supreme Court
Clarence Thomas was born in 1948 in a wooden shack in Pin Point, Georgia, a community founded by freed slaves near Savannah, and his first language was the creole Gullah. In 1955 he moved in with his grandfather and, for the first time, had indoor plumbing and regular meals.
His father left the family and visited only once after the divorce. His mother worked as a maid, and when the aunt caring for the children lost her house to fire in 1955, Thomas and his brother went to their grandfather, Myers Anderson. Anderson had little schooling but ran a thriving business delivering coal, oil and ice. He was strict and unaffectionate, drilled his grandsons in hard work and education, bailed out civil rights demonstrators, and taught that segregation broke divine law. Thomas calls him the greatest influence on his life.
Anderson, a Catholic convert, sent him to Catholic schools, and Thomas was the only Black student at a segregated seminary boarding school, where he excelled despite hazing. He set out to become a priest, but on the day Martin Luther King Jr. was killed in 1968 he heard a fellow seminarian celebrate the shooting, and he quit.
At the College of the Holy Cross he held a scholarship endowed in King's honour, helped found the Black Student Union, and waited tables to pay his way. Having struggled with English, he majored in English literature and graduated ninth in his class in 1971. He chose Yale Law School over Harvard, partly because it offered the most financial aid, and graduated in 1974.
Posts followed in Missouri, on Senator John Danforth's staff, at the Education Department and, from 1982, as chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Nominated to replace Thurgood Marshall in 1991, he faced bitter hearings over Anita Hill's harassment accusation and was confirmed 52 to 48, the narrowest margin in a century. He is the second African American justice, known for originalism and, until 2020, for rarely speaking in oral arguments.
Source: Clarence Thomas
