Clarence Thomas

Quick facts

• Born: June 23, 1948, Pin Point, Georgia
• Education: College of the Holy Cross (A.B., 1971); Yale Law School (J.D., 1974)
• Current role: Associate Justice, U.S. Supreme Court (1991-present) — second African-American justice and the Court’s longest-serving current member
• Confirmed: October 15, 1991, by a 52-48 Senate vote, the narrowest confirmation margin in more than 100 years
• Documented undisclosed gifts: Analyses by ProPublica and reform groups put the total above $4 million; Fix the Court counted 103 gifts worth more than $2.4 million between 2004 and 2023

Key positions

Biography

Clarence Thomas was born June 23, 1948, in Pin Point, Georgia, and raised in a poor Gullah community near Savannah by his grandfather after his father left the family. He was the first person in his family to attend college, graduating from the College of the Holy Cross in 1971 and earning his J.D. from Yale Law School in 1974. After early work in the Missouri attorney general’s office, at Monsanto, and for Senator John Danforth, he chaired the EEOC from 1982 to 1990 — its longest-serving chairman — before a brief tenure on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. President George H.W. Bush nominated him to the Supreme Court in 1991 to replace Thurgood Marshall.

His confirmation became one of the most contentious in Senate history after law professor Anita Hill, who had worked under Thomas at the EEOC, testified in October 1991 that he had sexually harassed her. Thomas denied the allegations and called the hearings “a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks.” The Senate confirmed him 52-48 on October 15, 1991 — the narrowest margin in over a century. On the Court he became a leading originalist voice, aligned with Justice Antonin Scalia, and joined conservative majorities in Bush v. Gore (2000), Citizens United v. FEC (2010), Shelby County v. Holder (2013), Trump v. United States (2024), and Loper Bright v. Raimondo (2024), which overturned Chevron deference.

Thomas’s documented relationships with wealthy conservative patrons are extensive and date back decades. He has a longstanding friendship with Dallas billionaire Harlan Crow and with Federalist Society leader Leonard Leo, whom he has known since his 1991 confirmation and to whose daughter he is godfather. Beginning in 2023, ProPublica documented that Thomas had for years accepted undisclosed luxury travel and gifts — including superyacht and private-jet trips, a 2014 real-estate purchase of his mother’s Savannah home by a Crow company (while she continued living there), and private-school tuition for a grandnephew Thomas was raising. Reporting also identified billionaires David Sokol, H. Wayne Huizenga, and Paul “Tony” Novelly as providing travel, and documented Thomas’s appearances at Koch network donor summits, arranged in part by Leo. Leo separately directed at least $100,000 in payments to Thomas’s wife, conservative activist Ginni Thomas, with the written instruction “No mention of Ginni, of course.”

The disclosures triggered a 20-month Senate Judiciary Committee investigation that subpoenaed Crow and Leo and, in June 2024, revealed additional undisclosed flights beyond Thomas’s amended filings. The committee’s December 2024 final report concluded that “the number, value, and extravagance of the gifts accepted by Justice Thomas have no comparison in modern American history.” In November 2023 the Supreme Court adopted its first Code of Conduct, which is non-binding and leaves recusal to individual justices; in January 2025 the Judicial Conference declined to refer Thomas for DOJ investigation. Thomas did not recuse from January 6-related cases despite Ginni Thomas’s documented texts to White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows urging efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

Sources

1. “Clarence Thomas” — Britannica — https://www.britannica.com/biography/Clarence-Thomas (birth, education, positions)
2. “Clarence Thomas | U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission” — EEOC.gov — https://www.eeoc.gov/history/clarence-thomas (EEOC chairmanship)
3. “Clarence Thomas Secretly Accepted Luxury Trips From GOP Donor” — ProPublica (Joshua Kaplan, Justin Elliott, Alex Mierjeski), April 6, 2023 — https://www.propublica.org/article/clarence-thomas-scotus-undisclosed-luxury-travel-gifts-crow
4. “Clarence Thomas’ 38 Vacations” — ProPublica (Joshua Kaplan, Justin Elliott, Brett Murphy), August 10, 2023 — https://www.propublica.org/article/clarence-thomas-other-billionaires-sokol-huizenga-novelly-supreme-court
5. “Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas accepted gifts worth millions of dollars over 20 years, analysis finds” — CNBC (Kevin Breuninger), June 6, 2024 — https://www.cnbc.com/2024/06/06/supreme-court-justices-millions-dollars-gifts-clarence-thomas.html
6. “Leonard Leo directed fees to Clarence Thomas’s wife, urged ’no mention of Ginni’” — Washington Post (Emma Brown, Ann E. Marimow), May 4, 2023 — https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2023/05/04/leonard-leo-clarence-ginni-thomas-conway/