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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It from WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. Thank you for spending part of your day with us. Whether you're listening on the radio, live streaming, or on demand, I'm really grateful you are here. On today's show, we'll speak with the author of a new book about a little-known piece of Upper West Side history. The book is called The Sullivanians: Sex, Psychotherapy, and the Wildlife of an American Commune. We'll also continue our full bio conversation about the Book King: A Life. Today we'll learn how MLK Joniour and Coretta got together and stayed together. Then we'll talk about how Ice got to be such a hot commodity. That's the plan. Let's get this started with a new podcast that tells the life story of a man who's become the face of ethical issues on the country's highest court.

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Alison Stewart: Imagine being a reporter who figures out our Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas' 90-something-year-old mother lives knocking on her door and then being invited in, and then she starts talking even after you ID yourself as a journalist. That's what happened to the host of the new season of Slate Slow Burn podcast called Becoming Clarence Thomas. We learn about the childhood of Thomas in Pinpoint Georgia with his single teenage mom and why he was sent to live with his grandfather. About his early bookishness and his one-time desire to become a priest, as well as his far left, I said left, politics is a young man who joined his college's Black Student Union and listened to Malcolm X speeches. How does this young revolutionary become a famously conservative Supreme Court justice? The answer is a bit complicated.

The podcast also spends time on the allegations of sexual harassment against Anita Hill and others, as well as the recent news that Justice Thomas failed to disclose a financial relationship with his friend, billionaire Harlan Crow, the man who bought the house where Joel visited and spoke with Thomas' mom on the record. The first three episodes of Slow Burn Becoming Clarence Thomas are out now and its host Joel Anderson joins me. Joel, welcome back.

Joel Anderson: Hey, thanks so much for having me, Alison. It's a pleasure.

Alison Stewart: This podcast was meant to drop as the Supreme Court would hand down rulings on affirmative action expected any day now. [laughs] There's this other competing top-of-mind news. We know the reporting around the revelations that Justice Thomas failed to disclose financial relationship, this relationship he had with this billionaire Harlan Crow, who was a large supporter of the GOP. How far along were you in the podcast production process when this information came out?

Joel Anderson: I would say that the news broke about two weeks after I'd actually been to the house itself. I remember this vividly. I showed up on April Fool's Day, April 1st, and then it was two weeks later. Of course, we're already thinking, "Oh, this is going to be a very timely podcast. We've got the affirmative action ruling, now we've got the mom, we got into the house. We didn't think that was going to be possible. Then, yes, two weeks later, the ProPublica series on the Harlan Crow stuff came out. It didn't require us having to totally tear everything up and start it all over again because it still is beyond the scope of what we're covering this season. It absolutely was really pivotal and we were like, "Oh, we've got to incorporate this. This makes a lot of sense, especially since we're in the house that he actually owns at this point."

Alison Stewart: I was going to ask, once sometimes when you get a piece of information that's new information, you go back and you think about something that you've heard in the past or a piece of information that maybe didn't mean anything to you at the time, but now that you know this other thing, it's like an aha moment. Did you have any of those given this new financial disclosure information?

Joel Anderson: I think it helped us at least with episode four, which comes out later today in that there's been a lot of talk in the last few months about what Clarence Thomas' relationship is to these very wealthy conservatives and what he's willing to do for them and what they're willing to do for him. I think that, for me at least, it closed the loop on how far ensconced in far-right politics Clarence Thomas is that I said, "Oh, wow, he actually owns this home." I think the thing that we're musing on is that-- and I don't want to speak for every Black person in America, but owning a piece of property is really powerful, especially in the Jim Crow South. His grandfather built that house with his hands. They've been able to pass that house down through the generations.

Now obviously his 94-year-old mother is living there now, and that he would sell it and to sell it to this guy, it's really telling what he's willing to give to his far-right benefactors. That part of it connected for us. That was the most surprising thing. Like, "Oh, this house is history and you were willing to give it up." For not even that significant amount of money. I know that there's ethical concerns around it, but $133,000, man, for a family heirloom, that doesn't quite seem like a commensurate with its value.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Joel Anderson. He is the host of the news season of Slow Burn. The podcast is about Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, born in Pinpoint Georgia, near Savannah to a single teenage mom. When you visited the area, sometimes you can get a sense of somebody from visiting their hometown. What did you observe about the hometown? What was useful to you as a reporter by being there?

Joel Anderson: It's instructive to think of Clarence Thomas as essentially having two hometowns. Pinpoint, which is right on the water about 15 miles south of downtown Savannah. It's just very tucked off, you could easily miss it. I think the isolation of the area helped explain-- Clarence Thomas positions himself as a person who's felt estranged from a lot of people that he didn't necessarily find himself fitting in with the Black folks that were around him. When he goes to school, he finds himself having difficulty finding a core group of friends. The isolation of Pinpoint helped to contextualize some of that because it's like the people that are there, a lot of them are related to each other. There's generations and generations of cousins that live down there.

That isolation helped a little bit. Then when I went to Savannah, I'd never been to Savannah Georgia before, even though I'd lived in Atlanta for a couple of years. This may sound counterintuitive given what I just said, but going to that neighborhood, visiting his mother's home, seeing his old high school friends, all these people, I just was surprised at Clarence Thomas' roots in Black Savannah and with the Black folks there. Given what we've known about him over the last 30 years and the way that he's ruled and the way that people feel about him collectively, you would think, "Oh, this is a person that is totally a creation of White institutions." No, he has very close connections to the Black community back home, and through the friends that have been there with him a long time, they've just come to accept him for who he is, which I think might surprise a lot of people that don't know Clarence Thomas.

I think that if you know Black people-- There are a lot of Clarence Thomas' in our community. Not all of them identify as Republican, but they're very conservative. That part of it was surprising to see that up close in person, to see people that vouch for him that don't necessarily agree with his politics.

Alison Stewart: How willing were people to talk to you about him?

Joel Anderson: Not very. [laughs] I had to work at it for pretty much everybody. There's a guy in the podcast that you will hear a lot of. Eddie Jenkins is a friend of his from Holy Cross. Eddie Jenkins ended up going to play in the NFL for a little bit, and he's the only person from that contingent of people who are willing to talk. That class is so star-studded. The Holy Cross crew that Clarence Thomas came in with, they wrote a book about it, it's called Fraternity by Diane Brady. They've got Ted Wells, who is one of the top attorneys in this country, Stan Grayson, Eddie Jenkins himself, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, all in this class. It was just shocking to me none of these people were willing to talk. Presumably, they don't share his politics, but they still hold those friendships and those bonds really close.

Eddie is estranged and he was willing to talk to us about that time in his life. Eddie is the exception, is what I'm saying. Most people just don't want to go there because they find him personally charming and they still feel connected to him, and they also know that if you talk about him without his permission, he will cut you out of his circle. It was very, very difficult. We have our means, we have ways to convince people to talk and sometimes one of the best ways is just showing up at the front door.

Alison Stewart: Let's talk about that. You explained the part, you figure out where Clarence Thomas' mother lives, you knock on the door. I want to say that you're exceedingly polite.

Joel Anderson: [laughs] Thank you.

Alison Stewart: You give her an upper-- you've said that you gave her a couple of opportunities to not talk.

Joel Anderson: Right.

Alison Stewart: [laughs] I mean this as a compliment, you code switch into "I'm a southern young man and I respect elders," [laughs] which she seemed to respond to.

Joel Anderson: Yes. The way that I think about it, and a friend was talking about this once, is that everybody wants to talk man. Everybody has a story to tell and to have somebody care about your life story is a beautiful thing. I think that somebody was interested in what she had to say and was interested enough to show up was moving to her. I really believe that I could have stayed longer if she wanted to. I just was like, "Man, she's 94. She just had a stroke last year, maybe I should give her her time to rest now." An hour and a half of talking to a stranger seems like enough, but I really think that the opportunity to talk, she's been overlooked a lot in Clarence Thomas' life story and I think that that was valuable. Also, I just think I just showed up, like you said, I tried to be polite. I turned on my southernness, and I think that that helped that I was polite to her, deferential to her.

This was not [inaudible 00:10:45] I was not throwing hardballs at her or anything like that, you know what I mean? These weren't the hardest questions in the world, but I think that it all just worked together when I walked in the door. I should say that there were two other people in the house, her great granddaughter-in-law and a grandson that was living in the house. That was the thing that made me feel a little bit more comfortable. I'm like, "Well, if you think it's okay for me to talk to this 94-year-old woman, you all know her every day, you know that I'm a reporter." I didn't want to lie about that, I think it just made everybody feel a lot more comfortable. I just think we just immediately settled into being able to sit down and kick back a little bit.

Alison Stewart: Let's hear a little bit from the podcast. This is Leola Williams, Clarence Thomas' mother, telling you about her memories of growing up in Pinpoint Georgia in the 1930s.

Joel Anderson: Life at the Waters Edge was idyllic in many ways, but Thomas' mother, Leola Williams, told me her childhood in the 1930s was marked by constant reminders that she was living in the Jim Crow South.

Leola Williams: They were saying that the Ku Klux Klans was all over Pinpoint. They burned a cross down, and then if we miss our school bus, we had to hide under the bridge to walk to school. If we see a car coming, we got to hide.

Alison Stewart: That is from Becoming Clarence Thomas from Slow Burn. It's the podcast that the fourth episode drops today. Three are available right now. I'm speaking with its host, Joel Anderson. What did you glean from those conversations about the Thomas Williams family dynamic?

Joel Anderson: Well they are people that came up very hard. Again, like any Black people that grew up in the Jim Crow South, particularly that part of it, the Coastal Georgia, there were a lot of threats that it was very hard to build wealth. It was very hard to find any stability. I think that Clarence Thomas' grandfather, Myers Anderson, in fact, the title of Clarence Thomas' memoir is called My Grandfather's Son, that is how much he thinks of his grandfather, was a very difficult person, a very hard person, a person that did not know how to read, but he knew how to work and he worked very, very hard. They prioritized that over anything else, and maybe not necessarily like intimacy, love, that sort of stuff. The warmth that they feel for each other is because of what they've overcome together as much as anything else I felt like.

That was one thing. Clarence Thomas seems to have-- since his grandfather died in 1983, I don't want to make assumptions about the relationship, but he was much closer to his grandparents than he is to his own parents. He doesn't know his father very well or didn't, and his mother gave him up to his grandparents when he was six years old. He's carried that resentment for a very long time. He respects her as his mother, but I wouldn't say that they are particularly close. One funny thing, when I was at the house and I'm in the room with Ms. Leola sitting in there in her recliner. She's got these pictures on her desk, and one of them was Clarence Thomas' ex-wife, the first one, Kathy Ambush. She doesn't have a picture of Jenny Thomas next to her.

I did ask her, I was like, "Are you close with them?" She said, "Well, I talk to Kathy pretty regularly." She's like, "I don't know Jenny that well," basically. [laughs] That gives you a sense of what that relationship has been like over the last 30-some-odd years.

Alison Stewart: I know Leola from Georgia.

Joel Anderson: Really?

Alison Stewart: It's such a name of such a time. It's so interesting.

Joel Anderson: What part of Georgia?

Alison Stewart: Hephzibah, La Grange.

Joel Anderson: I got [inaudible 00:14:45]

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Alison Stewart: There's a story, and it's a heartbreaking story, and it's one of those that would stick with any kid, and you name the episode after it, it's a taunt that Thomas suffered as a child, Thomas' dark skin, obviously, and his classmates would call him America's Blackest child. How did you find out about this story? As you think about this story, where in his life can you tell if that colorism has impacted his worldview?

Joel Anderson: For sure. He talks about the story himself in his memoir being called that, and all of his other friends that are from that time are aware of it. Part of it because he's held onto that forever, the hurt of that particular insult. I hate to say it, a lot of people that have listened to the podcast and I talked to, even Lester Johnson, his friend who talked about that with me, they think it's funny. They said it's very insulting. It's very cutting, and it also is unfortunately a very funny nickname, but for Clarence Thomas, he has held onto that hurt his entire life. It's just interesting because he talks about the pain of going on to Yale Law School and the frustration that he had with being thought of as an affirmative action student or whatever.

It feels like this is one of the formative experiences in his life, and he's used it to hold on to a grudge with a specific kind of Black person. He'll talk about this in his book and other people will as well, but he had a lot of resentment of lighter-skinned Black people that he thought benefited from affirmative action, were of a higher social and economic class than him. It definitely impacted him and it's something that has stayed with him. It's something that, even if you read his book, casually, he'll make a reference to, "Oh, they're that sort of a Black person," that they didn't have a hard time. With him, he conflates because of his upbringing, lighter skin a better social station. That has stayed with him, and I don't imagine that that has changed over the years.

Alison Stewart: We're talking about the podcast Becoming Clarence Thomas. It's the new season of Slate Slow Burn. I'm speaking with its host, Joel Anderson. We'll have more after a quick break. We'll hear about Clarence Thomas, the college revolutionary, and find out how he took that hard turn to the right. Stay with us.

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This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. My guest is Joel Anderson, the host of Slates Slow Burn Podcast. This season is focusing on Supreme Court Justice, Clarence Thomas. It's called Becoming Clarence Thomas. Episode four drops today. For a brief moment, he thought he wanted to be a priest. What was behind that?

Joel Anderson: Well, there are a couple of things. One, his grandfather was a converted Catholic. He started off Baptist, converted to Catholicism older in life because they were nice. They were socially progressive compared to most other people in Savannah. They had good schools, and so he insisted that Clarence Thomas go to Catholic church and go to Catholic school. While Clarence Thomas is going that path, he becomes an altar boy, and it becomes pretty clear early on that becoming a priest, there's a couple of things there. One, it sets you up to have to be tracked into a better education track early on. The nuns and everybody else are going to take a lot more interest in you if you say that's what you want to do.

Also, it was really important to his grandfather.

He said, "Once I wanted to do this, he said, 'You've got to do this. We want you to be the first Black priest in Savannah.'" That was his initial goal. Of course, he goes to the seminary and experiences some racism there, but that was the goal. Once Clarence, identifies, "This is a path that identifies me as exceptional and special, and people are going to take an interest in me." We talked a little bit about his childhood, how difficult it was, that was different for him. These people identified him, tracked him, it seems like he's going to get a chance at a better education. Then once his grandfather gets into it, then he's locked into that path early on.

Alison Stewart: He leaves seminary, attends Holy Cross, a predominantly White institution, and he starts developing these strong beliefs. He had a Malcolm X poster on his dorm wall. He wore a beret. Let's actually listen to a clip about how he carried himself at Holy Cross, particularly how he helped found one organization. We'll hear your voice, and then a classmate of Clarence Thomas. This is from the podcast Becoming Clarence Thomas.

Joel Anderson: In Conception Seminary in Missouri, Clarence had kept his outrage to himself. At Holy Cross, he wasn't going to stay quiet. During his first semester on campus, Clarence became a founding member of a new organization, a group where people like him would have a voice.

Speaker 5: The Black Student Union meeting every Sunday, I think it was right after dinner, so it would start like 7:00 PM. You had to be in your seat because then came the theatrics.

Joel Anderson: The Black Student Union, or BSU, became essential to his academic and social life. Those Rockers' Sunday meetings were a place where he could say what he wanted and know that he wouldn't be ignored.

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Speaker 5: We had Nation of Islam people, we had Black Panther people, we had people thinking that we're going to build our own nation within the a nation. These different voices would all come out.

Alison Stewart: How would you describe his views on race at this time in Clarence Thomas' life?

Joel Anderson: Well, you have to consider to that point, the only experiences Clarence Thomas had with White people were negative. That he went to a junior seminary in Georgia where they tormented him over his skin color and race. Nonetheless, he persisted and started off his college career at a seminary in Missouri, where one of his classmates openly celebrates the assassination of Martin Luther King. Clarence Thomas did not have very good feelings about White people. Did not have very good experiences with them. He gets to Holy Cross, and there's this cohort of exceptional Black male students, and they're all into different things. My idea about Clarence Thomas' politics at this point is they're still unformed, but he knows roughly that White people have been racist to him and treated him poorly.

You've got this diverse dynamic crew of Black students that are all there. They welcome him in. They've all come from all sorts of different places, got all sorts of viewpoints, and he obviously gravitates toward them. This is a chance for him to find his people, to actually have a social cohort. This is the first time he's ever done that. As far as his politics, the other thing that I would say about this, and we talked to Leah Wright Rigueur, who wrote The Loneliness of the Black Republican. One thing that she mentioned to me that, I think, stands out here is that the rhetoric of Black Panthers and Black nationalists in the late '60s, very sexy, very arresting imagery-wise. The clothes they wear, the way that they talked. If you wanted to be cool, if you wanted to be that dude on campus, that is a good way to get there.

We're talking about a guy that just came out of the seminary. He has no experience with women. Earlier in the podcast you hear somebody say he was very nerdy-looking. Nobody wanted to be like Clarence Thomas. This is a way to give yourself some social capital and maybe your politics will catch up later. I don't know how serious of a Black nationalist he was, but I do know that all of that helped the ability to wear that costume and to find a sanctuary in an old White environment.

Alison Stewart: He attends Yale Law School, but is frustrated. What was the source of his frustration?

Joel Anderson: That everybody thought that he was affirmative action case, and he was. He enters Yale Law School in 1971, which is the first year that Yale creates an explicit quota system. They wanted 10% of their incoming student body to be Black or a minority. They said it could be Black or other, or whatever. He was part of that cohort. Once he was there, there are some professors and students that say, "You're only here because of your race. You're only here because of affirmative action." That gets to him, but what really exacerbates his anger here, what really makes it worse, is that he's getting ready to graduate. You're thinking you're going to graduate from Yale Law School, one of the top law schools in the country, one of the top two ratings-wise, and he could not find a job.

The job offers were not coming, and he thought, "Well, the reason this is happening--" not that it's racism, not that they didn't want to hire a Black law student who is exceptional. He thinks, "Oh, they think that I'm an affirmative action case, and they don't think that I'm qualified, and so they're not hiring me." That's where a lot of his enmity for, not only Yale and the students and the staff there comes from, but also affirmative action. He thinks that it is preventing him from the opportunities that he rightfully deserves because people have no faith in his ability. Once he leaves Yale, he never feels the same way about Yale or affirmative action again.

Alison Stewart: As New York Times reported this morning, sometime in the next 10 days, the Supreme Court is expected to tightly restrict or ban race-based affirmative action in college admissions. The ruling could come as soon as tomorrow or as late as Friday, June 30th, before the justices leave for their summer break. What has been his consistent argument against affirmative action, Joel?

Joel Anderson: That it's demeaning to the people that receive it. That it is a way around the actual process for qualifications. He's taken this from his experience at Yale. He's like, "I'm here, nobody respected me as an equal, and therefore everybody else who gets the benefit of these opportunities, they're going to be similarly demeaned." or that this is something for them to be ashamed of because they didn't get in through what he considers the regular application process.

We've termed it this way in the podcast, affirmative action is one of his lifelong nemeses. It's fair to assume that when he gets the opportunity to kill it, he probably will, because he just really, frankly, believes that anybody else after him-- that this is skirting around the proper way for entry into these organizations in America.

That if you really deserve to be there, you'll get in the same way that all the other White students do. Obviously, there are people that think that that is a compelling argument, but again, this is a guy who at every point in his career has benefited from being the Black guy. That he's exceptional, but he's also benefited from being the Black guy. That's where we're going to be. Like I said, there are Supreme Court observers that know this better than me, but probably within a few weeks, affirmative action as we know it, race-based preferences are probably not going to exist. Clarence Thomas will have his longer-weighted victory over it.

Alison Stewart: When you spoke to people who knew him long-term or knew him at least when he was a younger man, what did they tell you? What were their thoughts about all of the allegations surrounding sexual harassment, not just of Anita Hill, but of other women?

Joel Anderson: They believed it was plausible. That this is a guy who openly discussed his affinity for porn. That some of the jokes like the leaving the pubic hair on a Coke can that Anita Hill alleged him saying to her, that that was a joke that he had been saying as far back as Yale Law School. That he had a very body sense of humor. He is a guy that liked to make dirty jokes and unsettle people with his crudeness. They're like, "Oh, I could totally see that happening." The important thing though, too, is that we talked to a lot of women that had worked with him, and they're like, oh, that is absolutely the way that not only did he treat Anita Hill, but that he treated a lot of what they termed reasonably attractive Black women that worked for him throughout the '80s. That this is behavior totally keeping with him. It was not a surprise to them.

The only people that we talked to that did deny that he was capable of that are John Danforth, the White senator from Missouri that gave him his first job out of college, and Armstrong Williams, who was his homeboy and worked with him at the EEOC in the '80s.

Alison Stewart: You interviewed Lillian McEwen, an ex-girlfriend of Clarence Thomas, who witnessed his rise in Washington and the conservative right really embracing him and how he changed throughout the relationship, which led to their eventual split. She brought this idea of a mask Thomas wore. Let's listen to part of the podcast, Becoming Clarence Thomas.

Joel Anderson: McEwen often felt that Thomas was going along to get along.

Lillian McEwen: I think of Clarence as wearing a mask. I think of him like that because I've had to do it so many times myself, and I recognize it in other human beings.

Joel Anderson: She says that conformity would emerge in all kinds of ways, even in his famous laugh.

Lillian McEwen: That's one of the things about Clarence that I hated the most because for me it was very forced and it was very fake, and it's also extremely loud. I mean, very, very loud.

Justice Clarence Thomas: [laughs]

Lillian McEwen: It's always like this, [mimics Justice Clarence laughing]. Something like that.

Joel Anderson: I can see why you hated it. You thought it was a performance.

Lillian McEwen: Yes, always. Always. Clarence has the ability to metamorphosize into many different masks. This is an ability that you cultivate from a very young age, from childhood in order to succeed or survive.

Alison Stewart: From working on this podcast, Joel, can you ever imagine Clarence Thomas resigning or being forced to resign? [crosstalk] There you go. Go ahead.

Joel Anderson: Oh God, no. No way. The thing is that the 1991 confirmation hearing radicalized him in such a way that he is so angry at people. If you read his memoir, the way that he talks about critics and enemies, it's very bizarre. It would seem to be beneath the Supreme Court justice to refer to people that have critiques of him, legitimate ones based in law or legal theory, he refers to them as enemies or whatever. He's holding on to anger from way back that starts with his grandfather, that goes through those playgrounds in Savannah where he's getting called A, B, C, at Yale Law School where people are calling him an affirmative action baby and all the people that think that he's a sexual harasser. He's extremely angry and he's been winning on the Supreme Court. He has bent the court to his will essentially.

The court has caught up to him. I don't know anybody that believes that he's going to resign at any point before the end of his life. This is really going to be a lifetime appointment, probably.

Alison Stewart: The name of the podcast is Becoming Clarence Thomas. It's the latest season of Slate's Slow Burn. I've been speaking with its host, Joel Anderson. Joel, thank you for making time today.

Joel Anderson: Oh, Alison, my pleasure. Thanks so much.

 

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