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By Root 8549 0

at Liberty University, which was founded by Rev. Jerry Falwell, Thomas departed from the usual pablum offered on such occasions to give an extraordinary self-portrait. He recalled his own graduation from college, at Holy Cross, twenty-five years earlier. He was something close to a radical in those days, an overall-wearing Black Power devotee with inchoate dreams of changing the world. “I thought I knew all the answers,” he said. “It was all so clear. I was just relieved to have completed my college education. I had often thought of giving up and going home. To my core, I was a swirling combination of frustration, of anger, of disappointment, of anxiety and perhaps there was a glimmer of hope, but it was well hidden. Mostly I was just confused. I had alienated my grandfather, and the dreams of my youth to become a Catholic priest had evaporated. It was indeed a dark night of my soul.” (In a lighter vein, he would sometimes recall that his Afrocentric worldview in those days inspired the name of his son. “We called him Jamal, so you can see where my head was in those days.”)

Always, when recounting the pain in his life, Thomas would return to the subject of his confirmation hearings: “And it is only by God’s grace and on his mighty shoulders that my wife and I endured the unpleasantness of my confirmation. In the end, our strategy was to rely on him, to endure the agony and then transcend the aftermath of bitterness, and we as a team, an inseparable team, are so grateful to you who lifted us up in prayer.”

Thomas appeared in public about as often as the other justices, but he picked his audiences with greater care. Only once in his first decade on the Court did he venture away from safe, sympathetic crowds where he could be guaranteed a warm reception. On that occasion, he decided to take on the most incendiary subject of all—race.

Thomas’s views on the subject were clear. Like Scalia and Rehnquist, he believed in a “color-blind Constitution,” that is, that the Constitution forbade any consideration of race. Most notably, of course, he thought any kind of affirmative action or preferential treatment for blacks should be banned under the Equal Protection Clause. He was a proud heir to the civil rights tradition of Booker T. Washington, which focused less on government assistance to blacks than on self-help and up-by-the-bootstraps individual initiative. To the extent Thomas discussed discrimination at all, it was usually in the context of the vanished South of his youth—or of contemporary bias against Thomas himself. He had an understandable sensitivity to the common (and false) notion that he functioned as Scalia’s pawn on the Court. This idea was absurd not least because the two justices’ voting records were different, with Thomas well to the right of his senior colleague. What was notable, though, was that Thomas attributed this canard to racial, not political, bias. As he put it in a speech in Louisville, “Because I’m black, it is said that Justice Scalia does my work for me. I understand how that works. But I rarely see him, so he must have a chip in my brain that tells me what to do.”

To say that Thomas opposed affirmative action is not to say that he fought all efforts to help poor people, especially blacks. He thought the traditional civil rights movement bred a culture of victimization in blacks and paternalism in whites. He believed that economics, not race, was at the root of poor people’s problems, and he opened his chambers to those who shared these views. He would read the names of striving black youngsters in the news and invite them in for pep talks. His friend Tony Welters, an African American health care entrepreneur, started a program at New York University Law School that awarded scholarships—without regard to race—to “outstanding J.D. students who are among the first in their immediate family to pursue a graduate degree.” Thomas liked the program so much that he allowed the school to conduct the final interviews each year at the Supreme Court.

As Thomas himself would acknowledge privately, he