It has been 16-years since Clarence Thomas had anything to say about his confirmation hearings on the road to becoming a Supreme Court Justice.

On October 1, 2007 a Thomas autobiography titled, My Grandfather's Son went on sale. A copy of the book, was obtained by The Associated Press.

Here is some of what the AP's Mark Sherman reports is in the Thomas book:

Anita Hill was a mediocre employee who was used by political opponents to make claims she had been sexually harassed.

Powerful interest groups were out to stop him at all costs and they chose "the age-old blunt instrument of accusing a black man of sexual misconduct."

Thomas describes Hill as touchy and apt to overreact, not someone who would wait a decade to level a charge of harassment, and complained to Thomas only about his refusal to promote her.

Thomas says now that he was "one of the least likely candidates imaginable" for such a charge, having made clear his desire to run an agency staffed mainly by minorities and women.

Thomas acknowledges that three other former EEOC employees backed Hill's version of events, but he says they either had been fired or had left the agency on bad terms.

You may recall that Hill, who is also black, worked for Thomas at the EEOC. She came forward after Thomas was nominated to the high court to accuse him of sexual misconduct going back ten years. Thomas denied the charges by Hill that he made inappropriate sexual remarks, including references to pornographic movies.

When the story about the contents of the Thomas book broke, Anita Hill wrote an OP-ED piece for the New York Times titled: "The Smear This Time".

In the piece, Hill makes the following statement:

I stand by my testimony.

Justice Thomas has every right to present himself as he wishes in his new memoir, My Grandfather’s Son. He may even be entitled to feel abused by the confirmation process that led to his appointment to the Supreme Court.

But I will not stand by silently and allow him, in his anger, to reinvent me.

In the portion of his book that addresses my role in the Senate hearings into his nomination, Justice Thomas offers a litany of unsubstantiated representations and outright smears that Republican senators made about me when I testified before the Judiciary Committee — that I was a “combative left-winger” who was “touchy” and prone to overreacting to “slights.” A number of independent authors have shown those attacks to be baseless. What’s more, their reports draw on the experiences of others who were familiar with Mr. Thomas’s behavior, and who came forward after the hearings. It’s no longer my word against his.

Hill also speaks to the accusation of being a mediocre employee:

Justice Thomas’s characterization of me is also hobbled by blatant inconsistencies. He claims, for instance, that I was a mediocre employee who had a job in the federal government only because he had “given it” to me. He ignores the reality: I was fully qualified to work in the government, having graduated from Yale Law School (his alma mater, which he calls one of the finest in the country), and passed the District of Columbia Bar exam, one of the toughest in the nation.

Hill ends her NYT OP-ED piece on a positive and optimistic note:

But questions remain about how we will resolve the kinds of issues my testimony exposed. My belief is that in the past 16 years we have come closer to making the resolution of these issues an honest search for the truth, which, after all, is at the core of all legal inquiry. My hope is that Justice Thomas’s latest fusillade will not divert us from that path.

BC has written extensively about Clarence Thomas. Most recently (July 5, 2007 - BC Issue 236) BC Columnist David A. Love had the following words in his column titled, "The Man Who Desecrates the Legacy of Thurgood Marshall":

Recently, in a watershed decision, Parents Involved In Community Schools v. Seattle School Dist. No. 1, the conservative majority of the Supreme Court outlawed voluntary racial integration plans in public schools. A number of school districts around the country initiated the policies to desegregate and achieve diversity in public schools, in an effort to offset racially divided housing patterns. The Court essentially said that desegregation is discriminatory, and compared white students who don't get the school of their choice to black students who lived under Jim Crow segregation in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education case.

The ruling is a resounding victory for the White Citizens' Council, and the racist governors who once blocked the schoolhouse door. The spirit of Jim Crow lives on in the hearts and minds of this Supreme Court's regressive, segregationist majority, over 50 years after Brown. "Diversity is illegal" is the new standard, it would seem, and we must do everything in our power to resist this.

"This is a decision that the court and the nation will come to regret," said Justice Stephen G. Breyer.

Meanwhile, siding with the majority, Justice Clarence Thomas concluded that school districts have no interest in remedying segregation: "But without a history of state-enforced racial separation, a school district has no affirmative legal obligation to take race-based remedial measures to eliminate segregation and its vestiges… As these programs demonstrate, every time the government uses racial criteria to 'bring the races together,'… someone gets excluded, and the person excluded suffers an injury solely because of his or her race… Simply putting students together under the same roof does not necessarily mean that the students will learn together or even interact. Furthermore, it is unclear whether increased interracial contact improves racial attitudes and relations… Some studies have even found that a deterioration in racial attitudes seems to result from racial mixing in schools."

Additionally, BC has also commented on Uncle Thomas in political cartoons reflecting our view of his support for the death penalty and opposition to affirmative action. We will let these images speak for themselves.

Your comments are always welcome.