Juan Williams: Clarence Thomas and me

I’ve known Justice Clarence Thomas for forty years. 

To hear some tell it, a column I wrote about him for The Washington Post in 1981 brought him to the attention of Republican power players in the Reagan administration and ultimately led President George H.W. Bush to appoint him to the Supreme Court. 

A friend joked last week that, by this logic, I am to blame for last month’s Supreme Court decision striking down Roe v. Wade. 

Sorry — not sorry. 

I’m a journalist. My job is to tell the truth.  

My truth is that Thomas is an historic figure. 

Thomas is the de facto Chief Justice of the Supreme Court based on his ability to coalesce the current six-member right-wing majority. 

Also, Thomas is the longest-serving justice on the current Court. He is already in the history books as the second Black person to serve on the Court. I wrote a prize-winning biography of the first, Thurgood Marshall. 

History will note Thomas is currently the most powerful Black man in U.S. government. 

And history will also record Thomas as playing a leading role in ending nearly 50 years of constitutional protection for abortion rights. 

The justice is on track to make more history. 

He set off alarms in his concurring opinion by suggesting the Court should move to “reconsider” other decisions enshrining the rights to same-sex marriage, to same-sex sexual relations, and even to contraception.  

As friends, over the years Thomas and I have talked privately about hotly debated issues. I sure don’t agree with him on abortion rights. And I don’t agree with him on easy access to guns.  

But his intellect and dignity in dealing with oftentimes unfair personal attacks have prompted me to defend him when I thought his critics went too far.  

But just as Thomas’ critics were wrong to demean him, I was wrong to dismiss warnings about him from abortion rights advocates.  

During his confirmation hearings, I thought personal attacks against him came from people applying a double standard to a rising Black conservative. 

Some of his opponents called me at the time to ask if he beat his first wife. Did he pocket money from South Africa’s apartheid government? One Senate staffer simply asked: “Have you got anything on your tapes we can use to stop Thomas?” 

I saw the attacks as rooted in opposition to a Black man standing outside liberal orthodoxy on race.

When they questioned his limited background as a judge, I noted that famed white justices, including Earl Warren and Felix Frankfurter, had no judicial experience before joining the Supreme Court.

Certainly, Thomas had flaws. But they did not compare to the Senate Judiciary Committee’s discovery that Hugo Black had been in the KKK. Black was confirmed.

I still deplore the left’s destructive personal attacks on Thomas during that time, which contributed to the growth of today’s toxic political culture. 

But since the 1991 hearings, I have come to appreciate the roots of opposition to Thomas as less about his Blackness or his conservatism.  

Now I see it more as a crusade by people with the prescience to worry about the future of abortion rights. 

At the time, Kate Michelman, then president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, said Thomas’ views would lead “directly to the loss of a fundamental right for millions of American women and families.” 

She was right. I didn’t think it was realistic to forecast that the Supreme Court might one day dismantle abortion rights. After decades, I saw it as a cornerstone of U.S. law and life.  

It is now a matter of history that Thomas proved to be a leading force in uprooting the cornerstone and further dividing an already polarized country. 

And then there is the damage being done to public trust in the Supreme Court. Gallup polling finds public confidence in the Court “reached a new low” this year, as the right wing dominates its decisions. And that finding came before the decision overturning Roe. 

Then there is damage inside the Court. 

My friends at the Court confirm the view expressed recently by New York Times correspondent Adam Liptak that Thomas’ “failure to recuse himself from a case that intersected with his wife’s effort to overturn the election” has “made the court an unhappy place.” 

Though we’ve lost touch recently, the man I know defies stereotype on so many levels: He is a Black man with an Ivy League law degree; he is a pessimist but a good friend with a big laugh, gracious with my children.  

Then there are the contradictions. As a young man he was a Black nationalist, able to recite Malcolm X speeches. Now, at 74, he surrounds himself with far-right white conservatives and is married to a white woman who sought to help a man viewed by most Black people as a racist — Trump — overturn a legitimate election.

This might only be the beginning of his place in history.  

As the poet Maya Angelou said, whenever someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.  

So, take Thomas at his word. He kept his word on abortion. 

It is time to wake up and realize that history will see us as living in the legal and political age of Clarence Thomas.

Juan Williams is an author, and a political analyst for Fox News Channel.