President George H.W. Bush appointed Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court. Bush announced the nomination on July 1, 1991, from his vacation home in Kennebunkport, Maine, choosing Thomas to fill the seat of the retiring Justice Thurgood Marshall. The Senate confirmed Thomas by a 52–48 vote on October 15, 1991, and he took his seat on October 23 as the 106th justice.
The Vacancy Bush Was Filling
The seat opened when Thurgood Marshall retired after 24 years on the bench. Marshall had been confirmed in 1967 as the Court’s first Black justice, and his departure raised immediate questions about who would fill a seat of enormous symbolic and legal significance. Bush’s choice of Thomas, who is also Black, let the president replace Marshall without leaving the Court without a Black justice, while shifting the seat sharply in a conservative direction.
Announcing the pick, Bush told reporters, “I am very pleased to announce that I will nominate Judge Clarence Thomas to serve as Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court.”1The American Presidency Project. The President’s News Conference in Kennebunkport, Maine
Why Bush Chose Thomas
Thomas was already a Bush appointee. In 1990, Bush had placed him on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, long considered the appellate bench from which more Supreme Court justices have emerged than any other.2Federal Judicial Center. Thomas, Clarence He had served there only about 16 months before the Supreme Court nomination.
Before the D.C. Circuit, Thomas had built a career that moved between private practice and government. Born June 23, 1948, in Pin Point, Georgia, he graduated from the College of the Holy Cross and earned his law degree from Yale in 1974. He then worked as an assistant attorney general in Missouri, spent two years as a corporate attorney at Monsanto handling antitrust, bankruptcy, and product liability matters, and served as a legislative assistant to Senator John C. Danforth of Missouri before entering the Reagan administration.3U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Clarence Thomas
The role that most shaped the confirmation debate was his tenure as Chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission from 1982 to 1990. Eight years running the EEOC gave him deep experience with federal civil rights enforcement, and it also made him a target for groups that disagreed with his approach to workplace discrimination policy. That record would come back into sharp focus during the Senate hearings.
The Confirmation Fight
The Senate Judiciary Committee gathered thousands of pages of Thomas’s prior rulings, EEOC policy documents, and personal records, conducted private interviews, and opened public hearings on his judicial philosophy and constitutional views. Then the process exploded.
Anita Hill, a law professor at the University of Oklahoma who had worked under Thomas at the EEOC, came forward with sworn testimony alleging workplace sexual harassment. She testified on October 11, 1991, describing specific incidents she said had occurred while Thomas supervised her at the agency. Thomas categorically denied the allegations. The committee called additional witnesses and spent days weighing the conflicting accounts, turning an already politically charged confirmation into a cultural flashpoint that dominated the news cycle.
On October 15, 1991, the full Senate confirmed Thomas by a vote of 52 to 48, one of the narrowest successful Supreme Court confirmations in modern history.4U.S. Senate. U.S. Senate Roll Call Votes 102nd Congress – 1st Session The margin cut across party lines. Several Democratic senators voted to confirm, and a Republican senator voted against. The Hill testimony and Thomas’s combative response had fractured what might otherwise have been a more conventional vote for a nominee with his federal experience.
Taking the Seat
Every new Supreme Court justice takes two separate oaths before assuming office.5Supreme Court of the United States. Oaths History and Traditions The first is the constitutional oath required by Article VI, in which federal officials swear to support the Constitution. The second is the judicial oath prescribed by statute, in which the judge pledges to “administer justice without respect to persons, and do equal right to the poor and to the rich.”6Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 28 USC 453 – Oaths of Justices and Judges
Justice Byron White administered Thomas’s constitutional oath at a ceremony on the South Lawn of the White House on October 18, 1991. Chief Justice William Rehnquist then administered the judicial oath in a private ceremony on October 23, which became the official date Thomas joined the Court. A formal public ceremony followed on November 1 in the Supreme Court chamber, where Rehnquist re-administered the judicial oath.
Thomas succeeded Thurgood Marshall as the second Black justice in the Court’s history, and he remains on the bench today as the longest-serving current justice.7Justia. Justice Clarence Thomas