Last week, Justice Clarence Thomas gave an address at the University of Texas at Austin to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, and in doing so remarked on the role of the court, government, and courage – or the lack thereof – to live out what he sees as the founders’ ideals.
The longest-serving justice on the court was welcomed by a standing ovation from students, conservative lawmakers, judges (including UT Law alumna Judge Edith Jones), and Republican megadonor Harlan Crow. Meanwhile, some UT students protested outside the venue, holding signs like “Stop the cuts” (a reference to UT’s consolidation of certain departments and programs) and “Clarence Thomas out of UT!”
The appearance was also notable for being in person. In late February, Thomas appeared virtually at a legal conference after security concerns prompted a last-minute switch from an in-person appearance.
Thomas led with his Georgia childhood, describing how “articles of faith,” such as the principles of the Declaration of Independence, were not merely matters of academic debate to the Black community he grew up in. “They were the holy grail, the north star, the rock, immovable and unquestioned.” Even under Jim Crow, he said, the adults around him – including his grandfather, who had no formal education – understood that equality came from God, not from governments who could then withdraw it. “Others with power and animus could treat us as unequal,” he said, “but they lacked the divine power to make us so.”
Thomas then turned to progressivism, which he described as a threat to those principles. President Woodrow Wilson, Thomas said, drew on the model of Otto von Bismarck’s Germany and dismissed natural rights as “a lot of nonsense.” “[Progressivism] holds that our rights and our dignities come not from God, but from government,” Thomas added. “It requires of the people a subservience and weakness incompatible with a constitution premised on the transcendent origin of our rights.” From this premise, Thomas spoke on Plessy v. Ferguson and Buck v. Bell and their connections to eugenics. Thomas remarked that “Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, and Mao all were intertwined with the rise of progressivism and all were opposed to the natural rights on which our Declaration are based.”
Perhaps of greatest interest to court watchers, however, were Thomas’ remarks on collegiality among the justices. Responding to a student question following his speech about the “warmth and friendship among Supreme Court justices,” Thomas conceded that things have changed. “Oh, I don’t know … when I said a lot of that, it was when I first went to the court, and that was a different court. That was the World War II generation,” he said. “There were people on that court like Sandra Day O’Connor, who I think gets way too little credit for what she did. These are people who respected – they were more in that tradition of a civil society, and who would listen to different points of views.”
Thomas added that in his 47 years in D.C., he has seen many people claiming to be principled but then abandoning this once in positions of power. He credited such changes to being “petrified by criticisms” or seduced by praise and retreating into “the tall grass of big words and eloquent phrases.” One example, he said, pertained to the court itself: “It could not possibly have taken my court 60 years to know that Plessy was a hideous wrong.” Justice John Marshall Harlan’s lone dissent, Thomas noted, made the right answer “obvious, as it so often is … [p]erhaps what stood in the way was cowardice.” Thomas continued that Plessy-era justices, he said, “made American children like me grow up in a racial caste system because it was easier to do nothing than to do the right thing.”
Thomas ended his speech with a direct appeal to the students present. “Nothing in the Declaration of Independence, I now realize, matters without that final sentence,” he said, referring to its closing that “And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.” “Courage, like cowardice, can be habit forming,” Thomas concluded, “and it will become a part of who you are.”