Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas Senate Hearings

St. James Encyclopedia of Pop Culture, Jan 29, 2002 by Elizabeth Purdy

In the fall of 1991, the nomination of Clarence Thomas as an associate justice of the Supreme Court became the most controversial nomination in all of American judicial history. During the background probe, information surfaced that Anita Hill, a law professor at the University of Oklahoma, had told someone that Thomas had sexually harassed her when she worked as his assistant at the Department of Education in 1981. Joseph Biden, Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which conducts hearings on presidential nominations, chose not to interview Hill and refrained from repeating the allegations to some committee members. When the story became public knowledge, women's groups began to protest, and seven women from the House of Representatives marched to the Senate, demanding entrance to the Senate Chambers and insisting that a hearing into Hill's allegations be conducted. Biden, with what would later prove a serious lapse in judgment, chose to make the hearings public. Americans were, therefore, glued to their television sets for one long weekend, beginning Friday morning, October 11 and ending late Sunday night, October 13, 1991, watching and listening to accusations, denials, and character assassinations. The lives of both Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas would be changed forever. Of even more lasting consequence were the battles that were simultaneously conducted between men and women, and between Democrats and Republicans, which led to an altered political landscape in the United States.

From the beginning, President George Bush had been faced with a formidable task in choosing a replacement for Thurgood Marshall, associate justice of the Supreme Court since 1967 and the first African American ever to serve on the Supreme Court, who announced his retirement due to ill health. Marshall had been a pioneer of the Civil Rights movement, arguing such cases as Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas (1954) before the Supreme Court when he was a young lawyer with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's (N.A.A.C.P.) Legal Defense Fund. This case essentially ended segregation in public schools and paved the way for integration in all walks of American life. Appointed by Democratic president Lyndon B. Johnson, Marshall had become one of the most revered Supreme Court Justices in American history. Because Bush was a Republican, his choice of a nominee to replace Marshall was certain to be a Republican; and because of the political climate of the 1980s and early 1990s, Bush's nominee had to be a conservative opposed to abortion rights.

The issue was further complicated by an earlier nomination made by President Ronald Reagan. Robert Bork was a conservative with a long record of judicial decisions, and writings that documented his opinions on almost every issue of concern to both Democrats and Republicans in the Senate; as a result, he was withdrawn as a nominee. Bush's advisors warned him that it would be better to nominate someone with less widely disseminated opinions in order to get the nomination past the Democrat-controlled Senate. Taking all of these things into consideration, Bush chose a little known Republican judge from Savannah, Georgia, to replace Marshall. At the time of his nomination, Clarence Thomas had been a federal judge for only 18 months. Despite his lack of judicial experience, he had served the Republican Party well in the Department of Education and in the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

It was this adherence to strict Republican ideology that created a lot of the early controversy surrounding the Thomas nomination. Since the campaign that elected John F. Kennedy president in 1963, black voters have been closely aligned with the Democratic Party. Many black leaders felt that nominating the conservative Thomas was a betrayal of the heritage of Thurgood Marshall. Women's groups were also opposed to Thomas' nomination because of his disdain for programs such as affirmative action, while legal scholars were opposed to Thomas' lack of experience as a judge. Although opposition was substantial, the chances that any of these groups could derail the nomination were slim. However, when it was learned that a black law professor had accused Thomas of sexual harassment, his opponents had a new focal point for protest.

Anita Hill was young, intelligent, attractive, and articulate. Moreover, she was credible when she presented her damaging testimony. She described in painstaking detail how Clarence Thomas had harassed her, repeatedly asking her for dates and frequently bringing graphic details about sexual encounters into the conversation. She stated that he described pornographic movies that he had seen. At a later point in the hearings, Hill's claims were corroborated by her friend, John William Carr, who testified that Hill had told him what was happening during a 1981 telephone conversation. Also waiting in the wings were other women who insisted that Thomas had sexually harassed them or who claimed to have known about the harassment of Hill when it occurred. None of these women were allowed to testify. In a thorough investigation conducted after the hearings were over, Jayne Mayer and Jill Abramson concluded that the preponderance of available evidence suggested that Clarence Thomas lied under oath when he denied harassing Anita Hill.