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Tim Grieve, Salon, October 1, 2007

In a memoir to be released today, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas equates himself with both Tom Robinson in “To Kill a Mockingbird” and Bigger Thomas in “Native Son.”

As a child, Thomas says he was warned by his grandfather “that I could be picked up off the streets of Savannah and hauled off to jail or the chain gang for no other reason than that I was black.” As an adult, Thomas says his 1991 confirmation hearings put him “back into Bigger Thomas’ world, a dark, cramped hell devoid of hope.”

The hyperbole here is breathtaking: Thomas’ rapid rise to a lifetime appointment on the Supreme Court was interrupted, ever so briefly, by allegations that he sexually harassed Anita Hill; in Richard Wright’s novel, Bigger Thomas is wrongly convicted of raping and murdering a white woman and then sentenced to death for the crimes.

But even if the analogies Thomas makes are somehow apt, what’s incredible is how little he has learned from them.

Writing about Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird,” Thomas says that Robinson, on trial for raping a white woman, “was lucky to have had a trial at all” after having been saved from a “lynch mob’s rope.” Writing a dissent in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld in 2004, Thomas said that the president of the United States has unfettered power to declare a citizen an enemy combatant and hold him indefinitely without charges. “Undeniably,” Thomas wrote, “Hamdi has been deprived of a serious interest, one actually protected by the Due Process Clause. Against this, however, is the government’s overriding interest in protecting the Nation. If a deprivation of liberty can be justified by the need to protect a town, the protection of the Nation, a fortiori, justifies it.”

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