00:02:34.080I'm seeing you through different phases in your life as a law clerk, hanging out in my chambers as the SG of Texas and now senator.
00:02:45.420So it's been a long journey, and also it's also an opportunity to say you're one of the people who actually stands up, particularly at times when others seem to wither, and I appreciate it.
00:03:03.020And more personally, when my wife and I were under attack for obvious reasons, you and Mike Lee and some of the other friends would stand up, Senator Kennedy, et cetera.
00:03:20.840Justice, that is very kind of you and especially for you to observe that I stand up in the face of criticism and attacks.
00:03:30.620That is powerful coming from you because you're someone who knows what that's like and has done so in a way that has been world-changing.
00:03:40.180And so Justice Thomas decades ago wrote a phenomenal autobiography, My Grandfather's Son, and you told your own story.
00:03:49.720It may be the best autobiography I've ever read. I read it at the time it came out. It inspired me. Actually, shortly after it came out, I was at home, and as it so happened, a young African-American boy, he's probably 15, 16 years old, came by the house, and I think he was selling magazines or something, knocked on the door, and I struck up a conversation with him.
00:04:13.860I went and grabbed the book and gave it to him and said, look, you should read this.
00:04:19.120You may not have heard Justice Thomas' story and journey, but I hope this will inspire you.
00:04:25.400And I think for a lot of the folks who listen to the podcast or watch the podcast, and some people listen to it on their phones, others watch it on YouTube or Facebook, they know who you are, but they don't know your actual story.
00:04:40.440And it is, as I mentioned at the beginning, it is unlike any other justices on the court.
00:04:46.300So maybe we can just start with – tell us about growing up.
00:05:32.260You describe in your book, and I recount in my book, when you were in that tenement, and that it did not have indoor plumbing, and so you used a chamber pot, and you describe walking down the stairs carrying a chamber pot.
00:05:52.420Well, it was, you know, it's sort of when I think of people saying they're having a bad day and you're seven years old and that happens and you don't have like a shower or the kind of a bathroom that people would normally have, you realize, I mean, to me, it defined a bad day.
00:06:18.860But then things that happened after that outweigh that.
00:06:24.880There's a wonderful song by a black minister that you hear from time to time if you go to a funeral at small southern black churches, and I won't complain.
00:06:39.520And you can have all these bad things, this litany of bad things happen, and you can say, I won't complain.
00:06:46.840because it's outweighed by all the good things that have happened.
00:06:53.420And those good things began with my grandparents.0.94
00:06:56.840And my grandfather was a Catholic convert, which was an oddity.1.00
00:07:03.120Catholics were an oddity in Savannah.1.00
00:07:05.880Black Catholics were really an oddity.1.00
00:07:09.320And it was because of that we were educated at parochial schools with my Irish nuns.1.00
00:07:15.640And those in combination, my grandparents, the neighborhood I grew up in, the nuns, Catholicism, forged a foundation that I've benefited from.
00:07:33.280Well, and your deep faith is integral to who you are, who you are as a man, I think who you are as a justice to your journey.
00:07:41.700Many people don't know you almost became a priest, and for a long time you thought that's what you wanted to do.
00:07:48.120Well, I think I would have been a priest, had the bishops at the time or the leadership in the church been as firm and had the resolve of the nuns during segregation and desegregation and civil rights movement, et cetera.
00:08:07.520My nuns were immovable as far as their propagation of the faith, their belief in us.
00:08:17.080They were the ones who planted the seed that in God's eyes, and you heard it at home too, we're all equal.
00:08:26.300That God made us, we were made in his image and likeness.
00:08:30.500So were the nuns more willing to speak out about civil rights?
00:08:35.560Of course, they had a vow of chastity and poverty and obedience, so there's only so much, but they were adamant, and they were adamant outwardly to the world and inwardly to us, so we couldn't use race or some of the other things as excuses.
00:08:57.400And it's hard to put it in context, but when I was in the second and third grade, this is again post-Brown, and the Georgia legislature was in the midst of drafting legislation that was reasserting segregation.
00:09:14.960and so people and for our listeners brown is brown versus board of education which was a seminal
00:09:21.720seminal supreme court decision 1954 that that overturned plessy versus ferguson plessy versus
00:09:28.160ferguson i think is one of the most in fact almost everyone thinks is one of the most disgraceful
00:09:32.640decisions the courts has ever decided where it it uh embraced the doctrine of separate but equal
00:09:40.520And Brown overturned it and ordered that schools be desegregated.
00:09:44.420And you were a student when this – I mean, this impacted your life.
00:10:41.300In Georgia, there's a dialect called Geechee.
00:10:44.860And in South Carolina, they call it Gullah.
00:10:47.660But it's just, it's a patois that for people who were not, who did not assimilate in the culture or who were not a part of the culture, we were isolated near the water.
00:11:03.820language and that's the way i until i moved to savannah that was all i knew um they called us
00:11:11.060back then they said we were bad talking today they celebrated it was a cultural thing but um
00:11:17.460the when i moved to savannah you're in in urban poverty which was quite different and i'm not
00:11:24.860going to go into all the details but then when you go when i went to live with my grandparents
00:11:30.440Even though schools were segregated, they were parochial schools, and that was different from the public schools because there was quite a bit of order.
00:11:59.180There was a lot of order, and that's what my grandfather wanted.
00:12:02.700Now, I think anyone understanding your life has to start by understanding your grandfather.
00:12:10.340You were raised by your grandparents principally, and your grandfather, Myers Anderson, I think you would say was the most important man in your life.
00:20:00.360But his point was about the warning that you had some people in Georgia who didn't like blacks, and they were bigots, and they were openly so.0.98
00:20:09.840And what you said is the southern racists were like rattlesnakes.0.98
00:20:57.180I loved, we used to get these magazines of the Mary Noel priests and serving, you know, kids who were, had disease or were poor or were having difficulties.
00:21:12.580And you get, you begin to feel that that would be a good way to spend your life.
00:21:17.660And then it becomes an issue when you enter the minor seminary.
00:21:21.680It's really a time of discernment and to see whether you have the capabilities.
00:21:26.180And I like the idea of being called to serve to do that.
00:21:34.180You know, when you have a vocation, you're asking yourself, what is God calling me to do?
00:21:41.540And that became actually, again, but for the weakness of the bishops, I think I'd be a priest today.
00:21:51.740Or not specific bishops, but the church itself.
00:21:56.180seem to be vacillating on the issue of race.
00:21:59.740And to me, the big, the major wrong in the country,
00:22:04.240the major contradiction in this country was the race issue.
00:22:09.740That you treat, you can place the importance of equality at the center of your founding document.
00:22:20.160And then you have this issue of slavery and its offshoots.
00:22:26.180Well, and the church was slow to recognize that.
00:22:30.800One point that I make many times is you look at Dr. King's letter from a Birmingham jail, and people forget to whom it is addressed.
00:22:42.920It's addressed to the clergy of America.
00:22:45.380He's writing to the leaders of the church saying, wake up and speak up.
00:22:49.420And my favorite portion of that letter, there's a group of senators, bipartisan senators, who regularly read that letter on the floor of the Senate.
00:23:01.140It's really powerful to read the words out loud.
00:23:03.520And there's a portion in it where he says the church should be a thermostat and not a thermometer, that it should be changing society and not just reacting to what's around.
00:23:14.100And that's ultimately what led you to leave the seminary and say that you were not going to go down the path of being a priest.
00:27:08.500So the church, the belief, the tenets of the church are not wrong.
00:27:12.520It's that the people are failing in living up to that.
00:27:16.740But at any rate, when you're young, you don't make those fine distinctions.
00:27:20.680And so I think an easy way to deal with that or a quick way to sort of respond when you're that age is to find these sort of radical movements you participate in, you protest, you sort of let off steam and you're angry and you feel empowered by that anger.
00:27:44.180But then as time goes on, you take a step back and you start thinking about what you're doing.
00:27:49.680And probably, you know, my grandfather asked me a question, and I've said this before.
00:27:55.560I would come, return home, and he would be upset with me.
00:27:59.780And he would say, after all his sacrifices, this is what I've become.
00:28:05.580And he would challenge me because I'd say the country's racist and we need to destroy it and all that sort of thing.
00:28:15.160And he said, and when you destroy it, where are you going to go?
00:28:18.340That was always the unanswerable question.
00:28:20.980What country is better than this country with all its problems, to which I had no answer?
00:28:28.640So I think that's planted the seed of doubt from this.
00:28:35.400And as I grew older and more mature and thought about things, in fact, about the time I was at Yale and had participated in enough,
00:29:32.820To spend all night doing something I don't quite understand.
00:29:37.140But that return, it was April 16, 1970.
00:29:46.440So I returned to Holy Cross from Cambridge and walked in front of the chapel
00:29:53.340because I was exhausted but couldn't sleep, walked in front of the chapel.
00:29:58.600And again, I'm not attending or anything, but I'm still deeply Catholic.
00:30:04.000And I face it in the Blessed Sacrament, and I ask God to take hate out of my heart.
00:30:09.280And I said, if you take hate out of my heart, I will never hate again.
00:30:13.980And that was the moment when you began to, for me, when I began to move in a more positive direction, when you begin to offload, it was like lancing a boil.
00:31:54.820and that means you have to take responsibility for it.
00:31:57.660And I really didn't like people saying, you have to do this, you have to do that.0.99
00:32:02.100We had this saying that there's only two things I have to do, stay black and die.
00:32:06.920And that was a retort to people who had these sort of requirements for us, these mandates for us because of our skin color.
00:32:18.620And the thing that's really kind of interesting, it wasn't until later on that people began to say that,
00:32:25.340But when I came to this town, one of the greatest difficulties, if you think about it, was that there were those who thought that I should think a certain way.
00:32:35.820And the difficulty has been that they said, oh, you're confused.
00:34:03.700In fact, I would prefer not to go in the building to not being able to embrace the ideas that I find that I agree with or that are important.
00:34:14.020Well, by any measure, one of your greatest legacies on the court, and there are many, but has been on race, and you have been a clarion voice in your entire tenure on the court for the principle that the Constitution does not allow racial distinctions, does not allow racial discrimination.
00:34:35.200The Constitution is colorblind and protects everyone.
00:34:39.960You know, it's interesting as you tell the story or the analogy of the library and then the stacks and the books that you might not be allowed to read.
00:34:48.340One story you have told is as a young man, I think in law school, somebody gave you a copy of a book by Thomas Sowell.0.97
00:34:56.200And you started to read it and threw it in the trash and said, if I remember right, that no black man can think this way.
00:35:02.040Yeah, that was Black Education, Myths and Tragedies, I think, one of his early books, and he laughs about it.
00:35:10.400Then, of course, he sent me a copy just to make sure I had it.
00:35:14.360But then, after law school, I was working in Jeff City.
00:35:20.860It's one of those Hobson's Choices.0.90
00:36:34.880Justice Clarence Thomas's epic journey from poverty in Georgia through faith, anger, and an extraordinary intellectual transformation would ultimately take him to the highest court in the land.
00:36:48.840In part two of the special edition of Verdict, Justice Thomas takes us inside the Supreme Court and shares how he approaches the Constitution, precedent, individual liberty, and the responsibility that comes with a lifetime appointment to the court.
00:37:05.980That conversation continues in part two of Verdict with Ted Cruz.