American jurist and associate justice of the Supreme Court since 1991, the same year that he was the center of a nomination controversy when a former employee, Anita Hill, came forward to relate a sexual harassment story to the Senate committee ruling on his appointment. Thomas is the second African American to serve on the Court, after his predecessor, Thurgood Marshall. Since 2018, Thomas has been the longest-serving member of the Court with a tenure of over 30 years. Thomas is widely held to be the Court’s most conservative member.
Thomas was assistant attorney general of Missouri from 1974-1977, and was legislative assistant to Sen. John Danforth of Missouri from 1979-1981. He served as assistant secretary for civil rights in the U.S. Department of Education from 1981-1982 and chairman of the Federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission from 1982-1990. He was appointed to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia in 1989 and took the oath of office 12 March 1990. He was nominated by President George Bush in 1991 to fill the vacated position of Thurgood Marshall as an associate Justice on the Supreme Court.
Born in the Pinpoint community near Savannah, Georgia to a teenage mother in poverty, Thomas was raised first by his grandparents and then by Catholic schools. He worked his way through the Conception Seminary from 1967-1968, received his A.B. Cum Laude from Holy Cross College, and his J.D. from Yale Law School in 1974. He was admitted to the Missouri Bar in 1974, and was an attorney for the Monsanto Company from 1977-1979.
His nomination proceeding for the prestigious post of associate justice became a major media event when a former employee, Anita Hill, came forward to discredit Thomas for incidents that occurred while she worked for him. The Congressional hearings on his nomination began on 10 September 1991 at 10:00 AM EDT, Washington, DC. A former conservative federal appeals judge, he had an assistant named Anita Hill a decade formerly. When his hearings commenced, she accused him of sexual harassment, denied by him. He made a denial to FBI investigators on 28 September 1991, the day after the Senate Judiciary Committee voted to send his nomination to the Senate floor without recommendation, after their appraisal.
On 15 December 1991, he won confirmation to the Court, overcoming a bitter debate that divided the nation and strained the Senate, with a vote of 52-48, after 3 1/2 months of heated deliberations centered on the sex charges. Thomas’ nomination was successful, however, and he took the oath of office 23 October 1991.
During his prior history, Thomas had earned a reputation as an outspoken black conservative who opposed minority preference programs. As recently as August 1998, Thomas, addressing 1,500 black jurists attending a National Bar Association annual meeting in Memphis, asserted his “right to think for myself.”
Thomas was married to Kathy Grace Ambush from 1971 until their divorce in 1984. They have one child, a son, Jamal Adeen. Thomas married Virginia Lamp, a lobbyist, on 30 May 1987.
In July 2001, a new book came out by David Brock, Blinded by the Right, in which he claimed that he had deliberately lied in an attempt to discredit Anita Hill and whitewash the reputation of Thomas.
Link to Wikipedia biography