Hill-Thomas Hearings

In September 1991, U.S. District Judge Clarence Thomas, nominated to the U.S. Supreme Court by President George H. W. Bush, began his confirmation hearing by the Senate Judiciary Committee. On September 27, the committee, tied in its vote on the nomination, sent the nomination to the Senate floor without a recommendation. Despite the committee's failure to issue a recommendation, most commentators believed the Senate would confirm Thomas. On October 6, 1991, National Public Radio and New York Newsday ran a story about Anita Faye Hill (b. 1956), a law professor at the University of Oklahoma, who had been a staff attorney under Thomas at the Department of Education and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in the early 1980s and who had told FBI investigators that Thomas had sexually harassed her during her tenure. The story was based on the leak of a confidential affidavit Hill had provided the committee on September 23. Her story made public, Hill openly repeated her accusations. In a comment later echoed by many women, Hill claimed the all-male Judiciary Committee had been insensitive to the importance of sexual harassment and had not questioned Thomas about it. Meanwhile, Thomas categorically denied any such conduct. On October 8, following a long debate in the Senate, the vote on Thomas's confirmation was delayed. Committee Chair Joseph R. Biden scheduled further hearings in order to provide Hill and Thomas an opportunity to testify publicly on the issue.

On October 11, 1991, before a nationwide television audience, the hearings on Thomas's conduct began. Hill described Thomas's repeated sexual overtures to her, charging that he had boasted of his sexual prowess, frequently used prurient sexual innuendos, and had insisted on describing to her the plots of pornographic movies he had seen. When asked why, if Thomas had harassed her in such a fashion, Hill had accepted a position under him at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, she explained that the harassment had stopped for a period, and she feared she would be unable to find another job without his recommendation.

Thomas's testimony flatly contradicted Hill's. Although Thomas asserted he had not listened to Hill's testimony, which he angrily referred to as lies, he denied any wrongdoing and repeatedly refused to discuss his private life. He denounced the committee's confirmation process as "un-American" and assailed it for staging what he called a "high-tech lynching" of him as an independent conservative black intellectual.

During the following days, as the Senate debated the hearings, Senate Republicans launched a furious assault on Hill's character and truthfulness in order to discredit her. Senators charged her with "fantasizing" about Thomas's interest in her. At the same time, many observers felt the Judiciary Committee had not investigated Thomas's veracity with equal zeal. Nationwide argument, which crossed ideological and gender lines, raged over whether Thomas or Hill was telling the truth, and whether Thomas's alleged sexual harassment was relevant to his confirmation.

Within the black community, debate was particularly pointed, although few, if any, blacks altered their position on Thomas's confirmation as a result of the revelations. Many, perhaps most, blacks saw the affair as an embarrassment, reviving stereotypes of blacks as sexually rapacious, vulgar, and mendacious, and the stigma of black males as rapists. Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson assumed the essential truth of Hill's version, but thought Thomas's conduct was an example of "Rabelaisian humor," a harmless example of "down-home courting." Some suspected conspiracies, as did black conservative Arthur Fletcher, chair of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, who claimed the hearings were a racist plot to pit blacks against each other. Yale law professor Stephen Carter called both parties victims of the confirmation process. Many black men and women considered Hill a traitor to the race for accusing Thomas publicly, and for trying to block a black man's ascension to the Supreme Court. Others defended Hill's courage. Jesse Jackson called her the Rosa Parks of sexual harassment. Toni Morrison asserted that black men such as Thomas wished to rise on the backs of black women, whose needs and feelings were ignored. Countless women, black and white, were inspired by the public discussion of sexual harassment to share their own feelings and stories of harassment.

On October 15, the Senate confirmed Thomas by a vote of fifty-two to forty-eight, the second narrowest winning margin in history. Public opinion polls published at the time showed that the majority of Americans believed Thomas and suspected Hill's allegations. Still, many women were politically energized by the hearings, and many women were elected to public office in 1992 with the support of their campaign contributions and activism. Within a year after the hearings, however, new opinion polls suggested that a majority of Americans now believed Anita Hill had told the truth. By that time, continuing public interest in the affair had been reflected in the publication of several books on the trials, including two notable anthologies of essays written by African Americans.

See also Jackson, Jesse Louis; Morrison, Toni; Politics in the United States; Thomas, Clarence

Bibliography

Brock, David. The Real Anita Hill. New York: Free Press, 1993.

Chrisman, Robert, and Robert L. Allen, eds. Court of Appeal: The Black Community Speaks Out on the Racial and Sexual Politics of Thomas v. Hill. New York: Ballantine, 1992.

Morrison, Toni, ed. Race-ing Justice, Engendering Power. New York: Pantheon, 1992.

greg robinson (1996)