He Changed His Life

Stephen Vincent recommends My Grandfather’s Son, by Clarence Thomas.

My Grandfather’s Son

by Clarence Thomas

HarperCollins, 2007

289 pages, $26.95

To order: harpercollins.com


Here’s a challenge: Read this book without skipping to the chapters on Anita Hill. If you go from first page to last, you will be rewarded with an inspiring, well-told and uniquely American story by one of the nation’s most accomplished black men.

It is an intensely personal, densely emotional autobiography from a man who has not been known for public statements or emotional displays. It is also the testament of an independent man who bucked the trend of racial politics, advocating hard work and self-reliance.

This stance, he claims, earned him powerful enemies who sought to destroy him personally and torpedo his nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court — and brought about Hill’s charges of sexual harassment. In the book, Thomas again strongly denies the charges. But the book is about much more than this one incident.

As the title suggests, it is first of all a tribute to Thomas’ grandfather, Myers Thomas, who sired Thomas’ mother out of wedlock, and took in Thomas and his brother when their mother could no longer support them. It is a hard-edged tribute that seems at times to be chiseled from Thomas’ heart, but it is born of love for his grandfather, whom he calls Daddy, “the greatest man I have ever known.”

The book also takes the reader on a journey through an America that few know.

Thomas was born into stark rural poverty in Georgia — 60 years ago June 23 — in the segregated South, where blacks lived in fear of looking the wrong way at a white person. He lived through the Civil Rights Movement and joined some marches during his college years, yet he didn’t like the turn the movement took in the 1970s, with the advent of affirmative action. Going to Yale Law School was one of his worst decisions, he claims, since his degree had the taint of a quota.

Thomas holds up the tough-love work ethic of his grandfather as a model for black people. Myers Thomas owned a small farm and his own oil delivery business that earned him a modest house on a safe street in Savannah. He was a stern disciplinarian who did not spare the rod, yet he loved Thomas and his brother enough to keep them off the streets and buried in their books.

Never one to follow the crowd, his grandfather converted to Catholicism as a young man, drawn to the quiet solemnity of the Mass and sacraments, and he brought up Thomas and his brother in the same faith. Thomas was educated by nuns who taught their students that God created all people equal regardless of color. He served as an altar boy and entered the seminary after high school, yet left after confronting racism among students. Thomas studied at the College of the Holy Cross.

Thomas’ personal life has been far from exemplary, as he admits. He started drinking heavily in college. He left his first wife and son, painfully repeating the pattern of his own father. He was deep in debt even when he was on the fast track in the nation’s capital.

Now married again, Thomas has not always been an outstanding Catholic, but he has written a great American story for anyone who is interested in the recent history of our country, and its future.

Stephen Vincent writes from

Wallingford, Connecticut.

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