The Supreme Court: Marching to a Different Drummer

By MARGARET CARLSON.

In the days after George Bush interrupted his Kennebunkport vacation to announce his replacement for Justice Thurgood Marshall, the tiniest details of Clarence Thomas' background began to tumble out. They ranged from the lack of indoor plumbing in the house where he was born to the cigars he smokes to the bitter divorce from his first wife.

Thomas, 43, is a bundle of seeming contradictions: a black conservative who made it out of dirt-poor rural Georgia to Yale Law School and the highest ranks of government yet is opposed to all racial preferences; a founding member of the Black Student Union at Holy Cross and a Black Panther sympathizer dressed in beret and combat boots who became the darling of right- wing Republicans; a lawyer who once called the Supreme Court's overthrow of segregation in Brown v. Board of Education "one of the most significant cases decided by the court during this century," but later criticized the ruling on the ground that it was based on the faulty assumption that any all-black school was automatically inferior to an integrated one. Thomas has gone from being a Baptist to a Catholic seminarian to attending an Episcopalian church, from having a black wife to a white one. He has built his career in part on an intellectual rejection of government attempts to redress racial prejudice while benefiting from similar efforts.

To some, Thomas' nomination looks cynical, a way for the Bush Administration to appoint a black whom civil rights groups and liberal Democrats would look churlish opposing while at the same time sticking to its efforts to pull back on civil rights programs. Jim Cicconi, a former senior official in the Administration who handled civil rights issues, explains the bind Thomas' critics are in: "It's going to be difficult for liberals on the Senate Judiciary Committee to go after Clarence Thomas for not being sufficiently sensitive to the interests of blacks and the disadvantaged, since he has been both and most of them have been neither." If the Senate were to reject Thomas, footage of liberal Democrats berating him for his opposition to quotas would undoubtedly play a role in Bush's re-election campaign.

In his writings and speeches Thomas has described his inner conflicts, calling himself a child of hatred and love, of malign neglect and compensating family attention, of painful encounters with white racism and the healing guidance of an order of Irish Catholic nuns. The President could hardly have picked a nominee whose early life better demonstrates self-help, Horatio Alger and Booker T. Washington combined in one man's struggle.

Thomas was born with the help of a midwife in 1948 in a wooden house close to the marshes in Pin Point, Ga., a segregated enclave without paved streets or sewers. His mother Leola Williams, only 18 when he was born, already had an infant daughter. When Thomas was two, his father walked out on the family, heading to Philadelphia in search of a better life. Pregnant with a third child, Thomas' mother lived in a dirt-floor one-room shack that belonged to an aunt and went to work at the factory next door, picking crabmeat for 5 cents per lb. The children wore hand-me-down clothes from the Sweet Fields of Eden Baptist Church and often went without shoes.

When Thomas was seven, the house burned to the ground and the family moved to Savannah; Leola and her daughter lived with an aunt while the two boys were sent to the well-tended home of their grandfather Myers Anderson. For the first time Thomas lived in a house with indoor plumbing. Anderson, who made a decent living selling ice and coal from the back of a pickup truck, could barely read but was a strong believer in education. He enrolled Thomas in a nearby school staffed by what white Catholics called "nigger nuns." They rode in the back of the bus with their students on field trips and rapped the palms of the children who did not hand in homework. Thomas' grandfather took him to meetings of the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, where he read his grandson's grades out loud.

Thomas' rigorous Catholic education continued at St. John Vianney Minor Seminary in Savannah, where he was the only black in the 1967 graduating class, and for a year at Immaculate Conception Seminary in Conception, Mo. Remembering his childhood as he spoke to reporters in Kennebunkport, Thomas choked up so much that he could barely get through the remarks scrawled in ink on a sheet of loose-leaf paper. "I thank all of those who have helped me along the way . . . especially my grandparents, my mother and the nuns, all of whom were adamant that I grow up to make something of myself."

To fill the seat of one of the greatest civil rights heroes, Bush found a black who actually believes in the Republican notion that minorities need the absence of discrimination, not affirmative action, in order to succeed. Thomas has pitched his political tent on a small plot of ground where black nationalism and Republican conservatism converge.

Thomas once said that civil rights leaders just "bitch, bitch, bitch, moan and whine." Years ago, he did complain publicly about discrimination, over an incident at the seminary in Missouri. Thomas told a friend, Jerry Hunter, now general counsel of the National Labor Relations Board, that he was walking past a room when a television news flash proclaimed that Martin Luther King Jr. had been shot. He heard a white student say something like, "It's about time you got the s.o.b." That day, Thomas told another friend, he decided that he would not stay at a school that didn't practice what it preached. Friends recall other racial slights: a note from a white classmate in his high school yearbook, "Keep on trying, Clarence. One day you will be as good as us." He was also ridiculed for his dark complexion. Once a student yelled to him after lights out, "Smile, Clarence, so we can see you."

At Yale Law School, Thomas sat in the back of classes and tried to hide his face in the hope that his professors would not notice his race. He wanted no special treatment even though he had been admitted under the school's affirmative-action policy. The program called for aggressive recruitment of minority students but it did not set quotas for their admission.

Bush was inclined from the start to choose an African American. Right after the 1988 election, the Bush team speculated that he might get to fill as many as three or four openings on the court. They latched onto the idea of enhancing the diversity of the court, appointing the first Hispanic and Asian American, naming more women and filling Marshall's seat with a black -- a curious approach for an Administration so vocally opposed to quotas. Emilio Garza, a federal judge from Texas, was brought to the Justice Department on Saturday for an interview, but he was quickly dismissed.

On Sunday afternoon, Thomas was invited to fly to Kennebunkport next day to meet Bush. When he arrived there, the house was so full of aides and family members gathered to celebrate Bush's mother's 90th birthday that Bush had to pull Thomas into the master bedroom behind the horseshoe pit so they could talk privately. Aides do not know if Bush posed the Eagleton-inspired question, "Is there anything I should know," but he did extract a promise that Thomas would stick out the confirmation process no matter how tough it got. When they emerged from the room for a lunch of crabmeat salad, Thomas was the nominee.

Thomas may agree with Republican conservatives on racial issues, but he arrived at those conclusions by a different route. His rejection of affirmative action is largely based on his feeling that whites will never be fair to blacks, a view long espoused by black nationalists like Marcus Garvey. Thomas is skeptical about integration as a goal because he doubts that it is attainable. Racial preferences, he says, sap the determination of African Americans and lead whites to believe that blacks advance mainly as a result of reverse discrimination. He would much rather see blacks pour their energies into building their own schools, but he sent his son Jamal to a racially mixed private school.

Thomas argues that no other group has been pulled into the mainstream economy by government programs. He resents the government's "experimentation on our race," which he says puts blacks in the position of having to account for every break they get. When Thomas was sworn in for a second term as chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights William Bradford Reynolds delivered the toast, "It's a proud moment for me to stand here, because Clarence Thomas is the epitome of the right kind of affirmative action working the right way." Thomas flinched. He is determined that there be no doubt that his appointment to the bench came about because of his own intelligence and hard work.

As Supreme Court nominees go, Thomas has little judicial experience. He is not a brilliant legal scholar, a weighty thinker or even the author of numerous opinions. As a lawyer in Missouri Attorney General John Danforth's office in 1974, he worked on corporate issues, intentionally avoiding areas like civil rights and abortion. As a lawyer at the Monsanto Co. from 1977 to 1979, Thomas shepherded pesticides through government registration. He returned to Danforth's staff as a legislative assistant in 1979, and in 1981 served briefly and quietly at the Department of Education's civil rights division.

It is Thomas' record as chairman of the EEOC starting in 1982 that troubles liberals most. Juan Williams, a journalist who conducted a series of interviews with Thomas over five years, wrote in the Atlantic in 1987 that Thomas was a "sad, lonely, troubled, and deeply pessimistic public servant." As the second highest ranking black in the Reagan Administration, Thomas was earning $71,000 a year, moving about in a chauffeured government car (which stopped most mornings at a Catholic church so Thomas could pray alone for a few minutes). Beside his desk he kept a flag bearing the motto "Don't Tread on Me."

Early in Reagan's first term, Thomas battled with Reynolds over the Justice Department's go-slow approach to civil rights cases. But at the EEOC, Thomas angered civil rights organizations by shifting the agency away from class- action cases to focus on specific acts of discrimination. He rejected the use of statistics on the number of minorities hired by an employer to prove discrimination. Thomas once asked a congressional committee whether anyone would ever suggest that Georgetown University was discriminating against white basketball players because its team was all black.

In 1990 Bush named him to a federal appeals court in Washington, which has often been a spawning ground for Supreme Court Justices, but Thomas has only ruled in 27 routine cases.

Though civil rights groups are understandably cautious about attacking a black, Thomas' appointment could spark a debate among African Americans about the best means for their race to progress. Though most blacks harbor an instinctive mistrust of anyone who worked with Ronald Reagan, not all of Thomas' views are as far from the black mainstream as some civil rights spokesmen would have it. For example, a growing number of black parents now send their children to historically black colleges in the belief that such institutions do a better job of nurturing young blacks' self-confidence.

Thomas' strong antiabortion views are another matter. As a Senate Democratic aide puts it, "If you were a committee liberal, would you rather oppose a sharecropper's son on the issue of civil rights or on the issue of abortion rights?" Unlike David Souter, who escaped scrutiny on abortion, Thomas has a paper trail. Abortion-rights advocates have seized upon a 1987 speech in which Thomas praised an article in the American Spectator that called for the constitutional protection of the "inalienable right to life of the child- about-to-be-born."

There are a few wild cards in the confirmation process. No one knows how Thomas will come across on television, although his private tale of triumph over high odds is likely to win better ratings than daytime soap operas. Thomas also has a respected political godfather in Danforth, who has an unblemished civil rights record and has been trying to persuade the Administration to accept a compromise version of the current civil rights bill.

Occupants of the row of seats reserved for family and friends when the Judiciary Committee begins Thomas' confirmation hearings this September could constitute a new American Gothic -- doting nuns in their 70s; a mother who works as a receptionist and nurse's aide at a hospital; the father who has rarely been seen since he abandoned the family; a sister, whom Thomas once criticized for relying on welfare and who now works as a cook at a hospital; his second wife, Virginia Lamp Thomas, of the Labor Department, who made her reputation in Washington fighting against comparable-worth legislation that would have required equal pay for women. There may be an empty symbolic seat for Myers Anderson, who died eight years ago. Thomas once thought his grandfather had "too high expectations." But Anderson may have been the only person who could imagine how high his grandson would climb.

With reporting by Joseph J. Kane/Savannah and Staci D. Kramer/St. Louis, with other bureaus