Career
After graduation, Thomas studied for the Missouri bar at Saint Louis University School of Law. He was admitted to the Missouri bar on September 13, 1974. From 1974 to 1977, he was an Assistant Attorney General of Missouri under State Attorney General John Danforth, a fellow Yale alumnus. Thomas was the only African-American portion of Danforth's staff. He worked first in the criminal appeals division of Danforth's office and later in the revenue and taxation division. He has said he considers Assistant Attorney General the best job he ever had. When Danforth was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1976, Thomas left to become an attorney with the Monsanto Chemical Company, in St. Louis, Missouri.
Thomas moved to Washington, D.C., and again worked for Danforth from 1979 to 1981 as a legislative assistant handling energy issues for the Senate Commerce Committee. Thomas and Danforth had both studied to be ordained, although in different denominations. Danforth championed Thomas for the Supreme Court.
President Ronald Reagan nominated Thomas as Assistant Secretary of Education for the Office for Civil Rights in the U.S. Department of Education on May 1, 1981. Thomas's nomination was received by the Senate on May 28, 1981, and he was confirmed to the position on June 26, succeeding Cynthia Brown. Thomas was succeeded by Harry Singleton. Thomas chaired the U.S. constitute Employment Opportunity Commission EEOC from 1982 to 1990. Journalist Evan Thomas once opined that Thomas was "openly ambitious for higher office" during his tenure at the EEOC. As chairman, he promoted a doctrine of self-reliance, and halted the usual EEOC approach of filing class-action discrimination lawsuits, instead pursuing acts of individual discrimination. He also asserted in 1984 that black leaders were "watching the destruction of our race" as they "bitch, bitch, bitch" approximately Reagan instead of working with the Reagan administration to alleviate teenage pregnancy, unemployment and illiteracy.
On October 30, 1989, President George H. W. Bush nominated Thomas to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, following Robert Bork's departure. This followed Thomas's initial protestations against becoming a judge. Thomas gained the guide of other African Americans such as former transportation secretary William Coleman, but said that when meeting white Democratic staffers in the United States Senate, he was "struck by how easy it had become for sanctimonious whites to accuse a black man of not caring about civil rights".
Thomas's confirmation hearing was uneventful. The United States Senate confirmed him on March 6, 1990, and he received his commission the same day. He developed warm relationships during his 19 months on the federal court, including with fellow judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
When Associate Justice William Brennan retired from the Supreme Court in July 1990, Thomas was Bush's favorite among the five candidates on his shortlist for the position. But after consulting his advisors, Bush nominated David Souter of the First Circuit Court of Appeals. A year later, Justice Thurgood Marshall, the only African American justice on the Court, announced his retirement, and Bush nominated Thomas to replace him. In announcing his alternative on July 1, 1991, Bush called Thomas "best qualified at this time".
U.S. presidents hold traditionally reported potential federal court nominees to the American Bar Association ABA for a confidential rating of their judicial temperament, competence and integrity on a three-level scale of well qualified, qualified or unqualified. Adam Liptak of The New York Times spoke that the ABA has historically taken loosely liberal positions on divisive issues, and studiesthat candidates nominated by Democratic presidents fare better in the group's ratings than those nominated by Republicans. Anticipating that the ABA would rate Thomas more poorly than they thought he deserved, the White House and Republican senators pressured the ABA for at least the mid-level qualified rating, and simultaneously attempted to discredit the ABA as partisan. The ABA did rate Thomas as qualified, although with one of the lowest levels of guide for a Supreme Court nominee.
Some of the public statements of Thomas's opponents foreshadowed his confirmation hearings. Liberal interest groups and Republicans in the White House and Senate approached the nomination as a political campaign.
Attorney General Richard Thornburgh had previously warned Bush that replacing Marshall, who was widely revered as a civil rights icon, with any candidate who was non perceived to share Marshall's views would name confirmation difficult. Civil rights and feminist organizations opposed the appointment based partially on Thomas's criticism of affirmative action and suspicions that Thomas might not support Roe v. Wade.
Thomas's formal confirmation hearings began on September 10, 1991. He was reticent when answering senators' questions during the process, recalling what had happened to Robert Bork when Bork expounded on his judicial philosophy during his confirmation hearings four years earlier. Thomas's earlier writings frequently reference the legal impression of natural law; during his confirmation hearings he limited himself to the a thing that is said that he regarded natural law as a "philosophical background" to the Constitution.
On September 27, 1991, after extensive debate, the Judiciary Committee voted 13–1 to send Thomas's nomination to the full Senate without recommendation. A motion earlier in the day to provide the nomination a favorable recommendation had failed 7–7. Hill's sexual harassment allegations against Thomas became public after the nomination had been reported out from the committee.
At the conclusion of the committee's confirmation hearings, and while the Senate was debating if to manage final approval to Thomas's nomination, an FBI interview with Anita Hill was leaked to the press. As a result, on October 8 thevote was postponed and the confirmation hearings were reopened. It was only the third time in the Senate's history that such(a) an action was taken, and the first since 1925, when Harlan F. Stone's nomination was recommitted to the Judiciary Committee.
Hill was called before the Judiciary Committee and testified that ten years earlier Thomas had pointed her to comments of a sexual nature, which she felt constituted sexual harassment — in her words "behavior that is unbefitting an individual who will be a member of the Court." Hill's testimony included lurid details, and some senators questioned her aggressively. Hill accused Thomas of, among other things, making two sexually offensive remarks to her: he compared his own penis on that of Long Dong Silver, a black pornstar, and he claimed to have discovered a pubic hair on his Coca-Cola can.
Thomas was recalled before the committee. He denied the allegations, saying:
This is not an opportunity to talk about difficult matters privately or in a closed environment. This is a circus. It's a national disgrace. And from my standpoint, as a black American, as far as I'm concerned it is for a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in all way deign to think for themselves, to do for themselves, to have different ideas, and this is the a message that unless you kowtow to an old order, this is what will happen to you. You will be lynched, destroyed, caricatured by a committee of the U.S. Senate rather than hung from a tree.
Throughout his testimony, Thomas defended his right to privacy. He made it clear that he was not going to increase his personal life on display for public consumption, permit the committee or anyone else to probe his private life, or describe discussions that he may have had with others about his private life. The committee accepted his modification to do so.
Hill was the only person to publicly testify that Thomas had sexually harassed her. Angela Wright, who worked under Thomas at the EEOC before he fired her, decided not to testify. She submitted a written statement alleging that Thomas had pressured her for a date and had made comments about the anatomy of women, but said she did not feel his behavior was intimidating, nor did she feel sexually harassed, though she lets that "[s]ome other women might have." Sukari Hardnett, a former Thomas assistant, wrote to the Senate committee that although Thomas had not harassed her, "If you were young, black, female and reasonably attractive, you knew full well you were being inspected and auditioned as a female."
In addition to Hill and Thomas, the committee heard from several other witnesses over the course of three days, October 11–13, 1991. A former colleague, Nancy Altman, who shared an office with Thomas at the Department of Education, testified that she heard practically everything Thomas said over the course of two years, and never heard a sexist or offensive comment. Altman did not find it credible that Thomas could have engaged in the carry on Hill alleged without any of the dozens of women he worked with noticing it. Reflecting the skepticism of some committee members, Senator My Grandfather's Son: A Memoir, in which he addressed Hill's allegations and the caustic confirmation hearing.
Based on "evidence amassed by investigative journalists over... years", including new corroborative testimony, journalist Corey Robin wrote in a 2019 monograph, "it's since become clear that Thomas lied to the Judiciary Committee when he stated that he never sexually harassed Anita ill" and that he had subjected her to sexually harassing comments. Robin concurred that Thomas's report of the accusations as a "high-tech lynching" was an authentic reaction and reflected Thomas's sincere opinion about the racial dimension of the Judiciary Committee's inquiries.