There is no more powerful, detested, misunderstood African American in our public life than Clarence Thomas. Supreme Discomfort: The Divided Soul of Clarence Thomas is a haunting portrait of an isolated and complex man, savagely reviled by much of the black community, not entirely comfortable in white society, internally wounded by his passage from a broken family and rural poverty in Georgia, to elite educational institutions, to the pinnacle of judicial power. His staunchly conservative positions on crime, abortion, and, especially, affirmative action have exposed him to charges of heartlessness and hypocrisy, in that he is himself the product of a broken home who manifestly benefited from racially conscious admissions policies.

Supreme Discomfort is a superbly researched and reported work that features testimony from friends and foes alike who have never spoken in public about Thomas before--including a candid conversation with his fellow justice and ideological ally, Antonin Scalia. It offers a long-overdue window into a man who straddles two different worlds and is uneasy in both--and whose divided personality and conservative political philosophy will deeply influence American life for years to come.

COURTING VENOM
Being Clarence Thomas

Dallas attorney Eric Moye received his copy in the mail from a fellow Harvard Law School alum. He started reading it but stopped to make a copy of the copy for a friend. He continued reading, absorbed, enchanted, depressed, exhilarated. Couldn't put it down--except to make more copies.

It wasn't a John Grisham thriller, but it might as well have been. "An Open Letter to Justice Clarence Thomas from a Federal Judicial Colleague" created an enormous buzz when the University of Pennsylvania Law Review published it in January 1992. Written by A. Leon Higginbotham Jr., chief judge emeritus of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, it was part history lesson and part admonition. Crafted with scholarly precision, it contained eighty--five footnotes and numerous citations of important court cases. But the essence of it read like a stern grandfather lecturing his bullheaded grandson: Don't forget the roots of your success, boy, and the responsibilities you have to those who paved your way.

"You...must try to remember that the fundamental problems of the disadvantaged, women, minorities, and the powerless have not all been solved simply because you have 'moved on up' from Pin Point, Georgia, to the Supreme Court," Higginbotham wrote in the conclusion of his twenty--four--page set of instructions to Thomas. Reciting a roster of notable names from the past, Higginbotham urged Thomas to see his life as connected to "the visions and struggles of Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Charles Hamilton Houston, A. Philip Randolph, Mary McLeod Bethune, W. E. B. Du Bois, Roy Wilkins, Whitney Young, Martin Luther King, Judge William Henry Hastie, Justices Thurgood Marshall, Earl Warren, and William Brennan, as well as the thousands of others who dedicated much of their lives to create the America that made your opportunities possible."

The "open letter" read at times like a personal letter and was dated November 29, 1991, which was shortly after Thomas took his seat on the high court. Higginbotham felt ambivalent about making his letter public but did so, he said, to help this generation and future ones better evaluate Thomas. Because it was so well sourced and because it was penned by a black twenty--seven--year veteran of the federal bench, the letter as law review article carried an authority that most Thomas critiques did not.

As such, it received considerable attention. The University of Pennsylvania received more than seventeen thousand requests for reprints, and law offices around the country busily churned out photocopies.

"Sometimes chain letters circulate all over the place," recalled Moye, "and this was kind of like one of those." Nowhere was the interest greater than in black legal circles, where a robust debate was unfolding about what kind of justice Thomas would become. Moye, a former state district judge with a weakness for Cuban cigars and the finest steaks, acted as if he'd reached nirvana. After he made his first copy of the Higginbotham treatise and got his secretary to make five more copies, he bought the bound version to put on his office shelf. So many photocopies were in circulation that another one even came back to Moye--just like a chain letter.

"It was spreading like fire across the dry prairie," Moye recalled. "Folks were calling one another speculating on whether Thomas would ever respond to Judge Higginbotham's open letter."

The showdown marked the beginning of a transition in the way African Americans came to view Thomas, a shift that helped harden his image nationally. Gradually but inexorably, wariness...

 

"Clarence Thomas, even as the quiet justice, is a clanging symbol of politics and race in our time. I can't think of two writers I'd rather have cut through the cacophony of the Thomas mythology than Kevin Merida and Michael A. Fletcher. In Supreme Discomfort, they have found the divided soul that divides a nation."

 

"Scrupulously fair and endlessly entertaining. Supreme Discomfort by Kevin Merida and Michael A. Fletcher is the definitive work on the Supreme Court's most elusive--and fascinating--personality."

 

"An engrossing biography of a conflicted man . . . [Merida and Fletcher] have done a superb job with this both harsh and sympathetic life of Clarence Thomas . . . an unflinching look at success and race in America."

 

KEVIN MERIDA is an associate editor at the Washington Post. He has been a national political reporter for the paper, a feature writer for its "Style" section, and a columnist for the Post's Sunday magazine. In 2000 he was named Journalist of the Year by the National Association of Black Journalists. MICHAEL A. FLETCHER covers the White House for the Washington Post, where he has been a reporter since 1995. He has previously covered education and race relations, chronicling issues including the racial achievement gap, racial profiling, criminal justice disparities, and the battle over the future of affirmative...

 

Supreme Discomfort by Kevin Merida
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