The opening of the new Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History and Culture has been marred by a controversy over a political bias in the celebration of African American leaders. While the museum’s displays largely ignore Associate Justice Clarence Thomas, it celebrates the heroism of his accuser from his confirmation hearings, Law Professor Anita Hill. The failure to honor Thomas, in my view, is outrageous. His life story is not just one of the inspiring accounts in African American history, it is one of the most inspiring of American history. His triumph over abject poverty and discrimination should be celebrated by all Americans regardless of how you view his jurisprudential views. Now the Smithsonian has responded and its explanation is hardly compelling.
Thomas has the quintessential American story of perseverance and ambition in overcoming odds that would have left many in hopeless despair. Clarence Thomas was born on the Georgia coast in Pin Point, Georgia, on June 23, 1948. He grew up speaking Gullah, the creole dialect. His home was a one-room shack with dirt floors and no plumbing. He grew up without a Dad, who left him at two. As a result, at the age of seven he and his younger brother were sent to live with their grandfather, Myers Anderson, and his wife in Savannah, Georgia. He used his Catholic education to overcome segregation and prejudice to eventually go to Holy Cross and gained admission to Yale, Harvard, and the University of Pennsylvania law schools. After a series of legal positions, he became the chairman of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in 1982 and later became just the second African American to join the Court.
Linda St. Thomas, chief spokesperson for the Smithsonian, insisted that it was just not a story that made the cut among the stories to be told: “There are many compelling personal stories about African Americans who have become successful in various fields, and, obviously, Associate Justice Thomas is one of them. However, we cannot tell every story in our inaugural exhibitions.” Really? But Anita Hill is such a story? I am not taking away from Hill or taking sides in their dispute. Yet, Thomas should have been on the top of any objective list of the great achievers among contemporary African American figures.
That is a story that should feature prominently in any museum on American leaders. The American public funded half of the cost of this $540 million museum and gave the museum a prime location on the mall. It should expect better.
@Tad Barrett, October 26, 2016 at 2:44 am
“Even if we overlook the fact that his appointment occurred in the shadow of very credible claims of sexual harassment, perhaps the failure to report his wife’s income over his entire time on the Supreme Court or the lavish trips and gifts her Tea Party lobbying afforded them had a slight mitigating effect on the Smithsonian’s enthusiasm for the least curious or intellectually capable Justice to serve in my lifetime.”
Thanks for calling attention to both points about Thomas. I watched and heard all of his confirmation hearings, and by their demeanor and in the context of who had the more to lose or gain in the situation, anyone who didn’t find Hill obviously more credible than Thomas admits to a painfully apparent lack of discernment and/or an egregious political bias.
Particularly revealing of his sense of entitlement and victimhood at the time was Thomas’ jaw-dropping assertion that the Judiciary Committee had no right to judge him, that only God did, and that the confirmation hearing was a “…high-tech lynching for uppity-blacks…”, as though the Judiciary Committee were the admissions committee of an all-white country club, and as if Anita Hill were the albino wife of the Klan’s Grand Dragon.
Additional public evidence of a self-serving aversion to truthfulness is provided by his falsely claiming on a Supreme Court financial disclosure form that his wife had no non-investment income:
“Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas failed to report his wife’s income from a conservative think tank on financial disclosure forms for at least five years, the watchdog group Common Cause said Friday.
“Between 2003 and 2007, Virginia Thomas, a longtime conservative activist, earned $686,589 from the Heritage Foundation, according to a Common Cause review of the foundation’s IRS records.
“Thomas failed to note the income in his Supreme Court financial disclosure forms for those years, instead checking a box labeled ‘none’ where “spousal non-investment income” would be disclosed. [Emphasis added]
http://articles.latimes.com/2011/jan/22/nation/la-na-thomas-disclosure-20110122
Perhaps, as in the case of Obama’s being too busy to notice that he was getting emails from HRC via a private server, Thomas was too busy preparing one of his famous SCOTUS orations from the bench to notice what he was asserting on the financial disclosure form.
For the abundant evidence brought to light after Thomas was very narrowly confirmed, that Hill was telling the truth and that Thomas was self-servingly lying, see “How We Know Clarence Thomas Did It”:
http://www.salon.com/2010/10/27/anita_hill_clarence_thomas/
Regarding Thomas’ dubious confirmation testimony regarding his position on Roe v. Wade, browse Paul Rosenberg’s essay at Crooks and Liars dot com.
Although there’s a sense in which I feel sorry for Thomas, and although I’m aware that we’ve all lied to protect ourselves at one time or another, I think it’s irresponsible to overlook such an important pattern of behavior in someone in as important a position in our society as being a member of SCOTUS.
Even if we overlook the fact that his appointment occurred in the shadow of very credible claims of sexual harassment, perhaps the failure to report his wife’s income over his entire time on the Supreme Court or the lavish trips and gifts her Tea Party lobbying afforded them had a slight mitigating effect on the Smithsonian’s enthusiasm for the least curious or intellectually capable Justice to serve in my lifetime. I’d hope that any judge on a lower court would be impeached and disbarred for that sort of stunning lack of ethics.
Spincity-
Good thing you declared that you would not relitigate the appointment of Clarence Thomas.
You might have spent 100% of your post on that, rather than merely a majority of your comment relitigating the Thomas appointment.
Thanks, Spincity, for demostrating that your’re basically a spinster.
You’re not even very good at it, but keep trying.
Mr. Turley what the has happened to you and your site? I’m not going to relitigate the Thomas nomination even though many here are more than happy to. I just find it odd that people are still willing to give Thomas a pass for behaviors that would result in a sexual harassment civil suite it they happened today. You may find the coke can allegation and the subject matter of “Long Dong Silver” appropriate for a person up for the highest court in the land, but I’m old fashioned enough to believe that a nominee for the Supreme Court should not have even the whiff of scandal surrounding him.
And please, the man spent most of his career being a Mini-Me for the departed Anton Scalia. He spent almost the entirety of his bench time on auto pilot. Compared to Thurgood Marshall, the man he replaced, he was and is a poor substitute for that giant of Jurisprudence.
I just find it odd that people are still willing to give Thomas a pass for behaviors that would result in a sexual harassment civil suite it they happened today.
It’s not odd. People aren’t convinced that Hill was telling the truth. The point is not at all obscure if you’re not doing mental gymnastics to avoid understanding it.
Spincity is an appropriate username.
Allegations are presented as absolute truth.
And alleged off-color jokes offends the sensibilties of those concerned about maintaining the dignity of the highest court in the land.
A BJ in the oval office probably is probably not nearly as offensive to the “dignity concerns” of the spinner.
That’s just the highest office in the land, but Clarence Thomas would need to be held to a much higher standard.
@StepStepSteponToads, October 24, 2016 at 7:09 pm
“No, they’re kooks, Ken.”
If your commitment to your ignorance regarding the CFR permits, consider the following “kooky” observations of the activities of the powerfully influential actors whom you with howling risibility refer to as “hobbyists”:
“The CFR headquarters and library is located in the five-story Howard Pratt mansion (a gift from Pratt’s widow, who was an heir to the Standard Oil fortune) at 58 E. 68th Street, in New York City (on the corner of Park Ave. and 68th Street), on the opposite corner of the Soviet Embassy to the United Nations.
“They are considered a semi-secret organization whose 1966 Annual Report stated that members who do not adhere to its strict secrecy can be dropped from their membership. On the national level, the Business Advisory Council and the Pilgrim Society are groups which form the inner circle of the CFR, while on the international level it’s the Bilderberg Group.
“James P. Warburg (banker, economist, a member of FDR’s brain trust, and son of Paul M. Warburg) of the CFR told a Senate Foreign Relations Committee on February 17, 1950:
“We shall have world government whether or not we like it. The only question is whether world government will be achieved by conquest or consent.” [Emphasis added]
“The Chicago Tribune printed an editorial on December 9, 1950 which said:
” ‘The members of the Council are persons of much more than average influence in the community. They have used the prestige that their wealth, their social position, and their education have given them to lead their country towards bankruptcy and military debacle. They should look at their hands. There is blood on them — the dried blood of the last war and the fresh blood of the present one.’
“They have only been investigated once and that was in 1954 by the Special House Committee to Investigate Tax-Exempt Foundations (the Reece Committee), who said that the CFR was ‘in essence an agency of the United States Government.’ The Committee discovered that their directives were aimed ‘overwhelmingly at promoting the globalistic concept.’
“A July, 1958 Harper’s magazine article said:
” ‘The most powerful clique in these (CFR) groups have one objective in common: they want to bring about the surrender of the sovereignty and the national independence of the U.S. They want to end national boundaries and racial and ethnic loyalties supposedly to increase business and ensure world peace.
“ ‘What they strive for would inevitably lead to dictatorship and loss of freedoms by the people. The CFR was founded for ‘the purpose of promoting disarmament and submergence of U.S. sovereignty and national independence into an all-powerful one-world government.’
“On September 1, 1961, The Christian Science Monitor printed the following statement: ‘The directors of the CFR make up a sort of Presidium [as in the Soviet Union] for that part of the Establishment that guides our destiny as a nation.’ [Emphasis added]
“On December 23, 1961, columnist Edith Kermit Roosevelt (granddaughter of President Theodore Roosevelt) wrote in the Indianapolis News that CFR policies: ‘favor … gradual surrender of United States sovereignty to the United Nations.’ Researcher Dan Smoot, a former FBI employee, said their goal was ‘to create a one-world Socialist system and make the United States an official part of it.’ [Emphasis added] (See ‘The Invisible Government by Dan Smoot (1962), available as a free e-book))
“Rep. John R. Rarick of Louisiana said in 1971:
” ‘The CFR, dedicated to one-world government, financed by a number of the largest tax-exempt foundations, and wielding such power and influence over our lives in the areas of finance, business, labor, military, education and mass communication-media, should be familiar to every American concerned with good government and with preserving and defending the U.S. Constitution and our free-enterprise system.
“ ‘Yet, the nation’s right-to-know machinery, the news media, usually so aggressive in exposures to inform our people, remain conspicuously silent when it comes to the CFR, its members and their activities.
“ ‘The CFR is the Establishment. Not only does it have influence and power in key decision-making positions at the highest levels of government to apply pressure from above, but it also finances and uses individuals and groups to bring pressure from below, to justify the high level decisions for converting the U.S. from a sovereign Constitutional Republic into a servile member state of a one-world dictatorship.’ [Emphasis added]
“Phyllis Schafly and Rear Admiral Chester Ward, former Judge Advocate General of the Navy from 1956-60 who was a member of the CFR for 16 years, wrote in their 1975 book Kissinger on the Couch that the CFR’s ‘…purpose of promoting disarmament and submergence of U.S. sovereignty and national independence into an all-powerful one-world government is the only objective revealed to about 95 percent of 1,551 members (1975 figures). There are two other ulterior purposes that CFR influence is being used to promote; but it is improbable that they are known to more than 75 members, or that these purposes ever have even been identified in writing.’
“The book went on to say that the ‘most powerful clique in these elitist groups have one objective in common — they want to bring about the surrender of the sovereignty and the national independence of the United States.’ [Emphasis added] Ward’s indictment of the group revealed their methods:
” ‘Once the ruling members of the CFR have decided that the U.S. Government should adopt a particular policy, the very substantial research facilities of CFR are put to work to develop arguments, intellectual and emotional, to support the new policy, and to confound and discredit, intellectually and politically, any opposition.’
“The published accounts of CFR activities greatly understate their power and influence on national and foreign policy. They have been called the ‘invisible government’ or a front for the intellectual leaders who hope to control the world through the Fabian technique of ‘gradualism.’ Besides their involvement in the government, they hold key positions in all branches of the media, including the control or ownership of major newspapers, magazines, publishing companies, television, and radio stations. [Emphasis added]
“The New York Times wrote:
” ‘The Council’s membership includes some of the most influential men in government, business, education and the press (and) for nearly half a century has made substantial contributions to the basic concepts of American foreign policy.’
“Newsweek called the Council’s leadership the ‘foreign policy establishment of the U.S.’ Well-known political observer and writer Theodore White said: ‘The Council counts among its members probably more important names in American life than any other private group in the country.’ In 1971, J. Anthony Lukas wrote in the New York Times Magazine: ‘If you want to make foreign policy, there’s no better fraternity to belong to than the Council.’ ”
http://modernhistoryproject.org/mhp?Article=FinalWarning&C=5.2#Operation
The Dems have been using and abusing black people for almost two centuries now, keeping increasing numbers dependent on the state, while more recently raising up a token few as spokespuppets for the purposes of spurious exterior “diversity” and other state-sponsored fraudulences and punishing those who, like Justice Thomas, succeed on their own merits, think for themselves, and refuse to play their role as puppets. Truly disgusting and depressing to see this play out even in nominally neutral government organizations.
@StepStepSteponToads, October 21, 2016 at 12:14 pm
” ‘The Manufacturing of a President: The CIA’s Insertion of Barack H. Obama, Jr. into the White House (2012).’
“You’re almost certainly wasting your time. The John Birch Society’s official line was that American politics was an artifact of a small corps of wire-pullers organized in the Council on Foreign Relations. There are kooks in this world and some of them are articulate kooks.”
———————-
It’s sadly regrettable to have to point out to you that characterizing as “kooks” people with whom you don’t agree or can’t comprehend has zero truth value and actually suggests a very limited ability to think on your part, let alone to articulate any credible reasons for your disagreement.
As to the credibility of authors pointing out the deep, pervasive, and publicly unacknowledged influence of the Council on Foreign Relations, as a vital organ of the Invisible Government, it hardly suffers by comparison with your own.
I call to the attention of the open-minded reader Gary Allen’s book, None Dare Call It Conspiracy (1971), available free in full online via the link below, in which he writes:
“Although the formal membership in the C.F.R. [Council on Foreign Relations] is composed of close to 1500 of the most elite names in the worlds of government, labor, business, finance, communications, the foundations, and the academy {My emphasis] — and despite the fact that it has staffed almost every key position of every administration since those of FDR [My emphasis] — it is doubtful that one American in a thousand so much as recognizes the Council’s name, or that one in ten thousand can relate anything at all about its structure or purpose.
“Indicative of the C.F.R.’s power to maintain its anonymity is the fact that, despite its having been operative at the highest levels for nearly fifty years and having from the beginning counted among its members the foremost lions of the Establishment communications media, we discovered after poring over volumes of the Readers’ Guide To Periodical Literature covering several decades, that only one magazine article on the C.F.R. has ever appeared in a major national journal — and that in Harper’s, hardly a mass-circulation periodical.
“Similarly, only a handful of articles on the Council have appeared in the nation’s great newspapers. Such anonymity — at that level — can hardly be a matter of mere chance.”
https://archive.org/stream/NoneDareCallItConspiracy_201603/None-Dare-Call-it-Conspiracy_djvu.txt
For an updated analysis (2014) of the power and influence of the CFR, see the youtube video of James Perloff, author of The Shadows of Power: The Council on Foreign Relations and the American Decline (1988).
It’s sadly regrettable to have to point out to you that characterizing as “kooks” people with whom you don’t agree or can’t comprehend has zero truth value and actually suggests a very limited ability to think on your part, let alone to articulate any credible reasons for your disagreement.
No, they’re kooks, Ken. They begin with an unsustainable proposition, then reason deductively from that proposition, then take disparate bits of data and fancy that these are ‘evidence’ of the proposition. And, when they run out of factual-data-out-of-context, they make stuff up. The Council on Foreign Relations is a group of hobbyists with about 2,000 members. They publish a soporific quasi-academic journal and have occasional meetings. That’s it. That’s all it’s ever been. Conjuring them up into some collection of Bond villains controlling the world (while only a cranky businessman from Massachusetts notices) is just that, an imaginative reconstruction. It’s bad fiction, not history. And you’re all godawful bores.
We so-called voters are going to soon get exactly what we deserve for worshiping entertainers while ignoring the foxes gathering to guard the henhouses, with our shamefully being old fashioned AOL (Absent Without Leave)