Speaking Truth to Power - Anita Hill [33]
I even had an opportunity to make some overtures to those in the civil rights and women’s rights communities. This was a particularly sensitive effort. Telephone calls to civil rights agencies and gender rights agencies yielded mixed results in part because, still relatively new to Washington, I had few connections in those communities, and many of the people I spoke to distrusted the overtures. We managed to establish a meeting with representatives of the NAACP-LDF, the NOW Legal Defense Fund, and the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights, but there was little follow-up. For political reasons, many associated with the administration wanted the assistant secretary’s office to limit such contacts. Nevertheless, since the office had a history of working with such groups, I was happy to try to maintain something of those relationships. I saw them as providing a necessary link between what had occurred in the past and what I hoped would be accomplished in the future. I knew that the administration would do very little to promote busing as an alternative, but Thomas assured me that we could take an aggressive role toward enhancing the quality of predominantly minority schools and ensuring gender equity in programs.
The staff of the Office for Civil Rights reflected the same conflicting emotions that troubled those outside in the civil rights community. Many of the staff were committed to the vigorous enforcement of civil rights. In varying degrees, former administrations had been committed to this ideal as well. Yet the ideal was in conflict with the rhetoric of the new administration, and the conflict was even more profound because the administration had chosen a black man to carry out its policies. The people who had been working at the Office for Civil Rights took a wait-and-see attitude, showing deference to Clarence Thomas because he was, after all, the appointed head of the office. More important, as a black man he presumably shared the race struggle that they were engaged in professionally and in some cases personally as well.
Nevertheless, Thomas was known to be a conservative—albeit a black conservative. This concept was new in the political mix of the Washington civil rights community in the 1980s, and many did not know what to make of it. The deference granted to Clarence Thomas because of his race was balanced by skepticism. And the civil rights community, including many people at the Office for Civil Rights, wondered how Thomas could be committed to both civil rights and the rhetoric of the Reagan administration. As Thomas’ assistant, I met with the same skepticism. I had one other problem. Because I was a young, single black woman, the rumor mill speculated that I had been hired for both my race and my sex. Aware of this, I stuck to my work, made only a few friends in the office, and kept counsel with friends outside the office about Clarence Thomas. For me the work was what mattered.
One project on which I spent a good deal of time was an article I ghostwrote for Thomas on the state of minority education and academic achievement. The article explored the role of the historically black school in the academic achievement of black students during Jim Crow. Though it recognized the decline in black achievement scores in the years following the 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education, it fell short of blaming busing and school desegregation. Instead, I cited economics in general, and in particular the deterioration of the economic base of inner-city schools, as the reason for the decline in standardized achievement test scores. The article was published with Clarence Thomas as author.
In 1983, when I left his employ, Thomas expressed