Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas Senate Hearings

In the fall of 1991, the nomination of Clarence Thomas as an associate justice of the Supreme Court became the most controversial nomination in all of American judicial history. During the background probe, information surfaced that Anita Hill, a law professor at the University of Oklahoma, had told someone that Thomas had sexually harassed her when she worked as his assistant at the Department of Education in 1981. Joseph Biden, Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which conducts hearings on presidential nominations, chose not to interview Hill and refrained from repeating the allegations to some committee members. When the story became public knowledge, women's groups began to protest, and seven women from the House of Representatives marched to the Senate, demanding entrance to the Senate Chambers and insisting that a hearing into Hill's allegations be conducted. Biden, with what would later prove a serious lapse in judgment, chose to make the hearings public. Americans were, therefore, glued to their television sets for one long weekend, beginning Friday morning, October 11 and ending late Sunday night, October 13, 1991, watching and listening to accusations, denials, and character assassinations. The lives of both Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas would be changed forever. Of even more lasting consequence were the battles that were simultaneously conducted between men and women, and between Democrats and Republicans, which led to an altered political landscape in the United States.

From the beginning, President George Bush had been faced with a formidable task in choosing a replacement for Thurgood Marshall, associate justice of the Supreme Court since 1967 and the first African American ever to serve on the Supreme Court, who announced his retirement due to ill health. Marshall had been a pioneer of the Civil Rights movement, arguing such cases as Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas (1954) before the Supreme Court when he was a young lawyer with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's (N.A.A.C.P.) Legal Defense Fund. This case essentially ended segregation in public schools and paved the way for integration in all walks of American life. Appointed by Democratic president Lyndon B. Johnson, Marshall had become one of the most revered Supreme Court Justices in American history. Because Bush was a Republican, his choice of a nominee to replace Marshall was certain to be a Republican; and because of the political climate of the 1980s and early 1990s, Bush's nominee had to be a conservative opposed to abortion rights.

The issue was further complicated by an earlier nomination made by President Ronald Reagan. Robert Bork was a conservative with a long record of judicial decisions, and writings that documented his opinions on almost every issue of concern to both Democrats and Republicans in the Senate; as a result, he was withdrawn as a nominee. Bush's advisors warned him that it would be better to nominate someone with less widely disseminated opinions in order to get the nomination past the Democrat-controlled Senate. Taking all of these things into consideration, Bush chose a little known Republican judge from Savannah, Georgia, to replace Marshall. At the time of his nomination, Clarence Thomas had been a federal judge for only 18 months. Despite his lack of judicial experience, he had served the Republican Party well in the Department of Education and in the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

It was this adherence to strict Republican ideology that created a lot of the early controversy surrounding the Thomas nomination. Since the campaign that elected John F. Kennedy president in 1963, black voters have been closely aligned with the Democratic Party. Many black leaders felt that nominating the conservative Thomas was a betrayal of the heritage of Thurgood Marshall. Women's groups were also opposed to Thomas' nomination because of his disdain for programs such as affirmative action, while legal scholars were opposed to Thomas' lack of experience as a judge. Although opposition was substantial, the chances that any of these groups could derail the nomination were slim. However, when it was learned that a black law professor had accused Thomas of sexual harassment, his opponents had a new focal point for protest.

Anita Hill was young, intelligent, attractive, and articulate. Moreover, she was credible when she presented her damaging testimony. She described in painstaking detail how Clarence Thomas had harassed her, repeatedly asking her for dates and frequently bringing graphic details about sexual encounters into the conversation. She stated that he described pornographic movies that he had seen. At a later point in the hearings, Hill's claims were corroborated by her friend, John William Carr, who testified that Hill had told him what was happening during a 1981 telephone conversation. Also waiting in the wings were other women who insisted that Thomas had sexually harassed them or who claimed to have known about the harassment of Hill when it occurred. None of these women were allowed to testify. In a thorough investigation conducted after the hearings were over, Jayne Mayer and Jill Abramson concluded that the preponderance of available evidence suggested that Clarence Thomas lied under oath when he denied harassing Anita Hill.

Clarence Thomas, however, was not without his supporters, either during the hearings or afterward. The Bush White House concocted the strategy that Thomas should claim that opposition to his nomination was racially motivated. Thus, the cries of a "high-tech lynching" were born. The strategy proved successful. Thomas went on to win the vote of the entire Senate by a vote of 52-48, though George Bush was so apprehensive about the nomination that he placed the then vice-president Dan Quayle at the ready to break the tie vote if it became necessary. The Bush strategy was particularly productive among Southern senators, unable to live down their heritage of racial discrimination. Of all Southern senators, only Hal Heflin, a Democrat from Alabama and a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, voted against the Thomas nomination. Conservative author David Brock conducted his own investigation, concluding that there was no evidence that Hill had told the truth and announcing his support for Thomas.

That two books written about the hearings should draw such opposing conclusions is indicative of the overall reaction to the debacle that was the Clarence Thomas nomination. Generally, women tended to believe Hill and men tended to believe Thomas, and further divisions broke along party lines. Despite the fact that the authors of both books claim objectivity, it is evident that they approached the hearings from opposing contexts. Much of the blame for the ensuing battle of the sexes should be placed on Joseph Biden and the Senate Judiciary Committee. When American women were faced with an all-white, all-male committee conducting hearings into the sexual harassment of women, they were furious that Hill's charges were never placed in the overall context of how sexual harassment occurs and the subsequent feelings of helplessness and degradation that are common among victims of such harassment.

Furthermore, most scholars agree that the hearings should never have been made public. It was never the intention of the Judiciary Committee to discover the truth of the allegations. Republican members of the committee, such as Orrin Hatch and Alan Simpson, were allowed to grandstand and throw out suggestions that Hill's character was questionable without ever giving her a chance to answer specific charges. Perhaps the most questionable of the witnesses against Hill was John Doggett, who came on in the early hours of Monday morning, October 14, claiming that Hill was irrational and neurotic on the grounds that she had once asked him why he did not call her after they had gone out on a date.

No one knows whether it was Clarence Thomas or Anita Hill who told the truth in 1991. Most people continue to have their own opinions on the matter, but neither Hill, Thomas, nor the American people were well served by the way that the hearing was conducted. After the hearings, women continued to claim that men just "didn't get it." The Year of the Woman was declared in 1992, and a record-breaking number of women entered the two houses of Congress. Public recognition of sexual harassment become prominent, and new ways of dealing with the opposite sex within the workplace began to be mandated by legislatures at all levels. In a landmark decision, the Supreme Court upheld the requirement that employers provide a "non-hostile" working environment for their employees in Harris v. Forklift Systems (1993). The year after the Thomas hearings, the number of sexual harassment lawsuits in the United States jumped by 50 percent. Heightened awareness of sexual harassment has been one of the positive byproducts of the hearings, but the bitterness about the hearings did not disappear.

Anita Hill broke her silence about the hearings in her 1997 book Speaking Truth to Power. She writes that her life has never been the same since the hearings, and spoke of intimidation that she suffered at the hands of Thomas supporters. By the end of the 1990s, she was no longer teaching at the University of Oklahoma, a job she reportedly loved. A former friend and classmate of Clarence Thomas corroborated Hill's view of Thomas's character in a television interview, as did others who knew him. However, the support for Hill was essentially irrelevant once Thomas was confirmed as an associate justice of the Supreme Court.

Juan Williams, author of The Eyes on the Prize, said of Thomas that he was a sad, lonely, troubled, and deeply pessimistic public servant. To Williams' description of Thomas, it should be added that he grew bitter and angry at a system that allowed him to become the butt of jokes and the target of frequent attacks from opponents. His votes on Supreme Court decisions have placed him as a solidly conservative justice, who most often mirrors the decision making of Antonin Scalia, considered by judicial scholars to be the most conservative member of the Supreme Court. His voting record has continued to alienate Thomas from most of the African-American community and has frequently led to protest when he has been invited to lecture around the country. Richard Lacayo of Time reported that Thomas told someone in a 1994 interview that he intended to be on the Court for the next 40 years and those who did not like it should simply "get over it." Lacayo responded that it was not likely that Americans would get over it. The Hill-Thomas hearings have not slid gently into history. On the contrary, the memory of those hearings continues to elicit strong feelings of rage, bafflement, and bitterness. The Senate Judiciary Committee now holds closed hearings, and women now serve on the august body. What constitutes sexual harassment is now public knowledge, but the mistakes made in the fall of 1991 will forever haunt those who remember it.

—Elizabeth Purdy

Further Reading:

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

Hill, Anita. Speaking Truth to Power. New York, Doubleday, 1997.

Hill, Anita, and Emma Coleman, editors. Race, Gender, and Power in America: The Legacy of the Hill-Thomas Hearings. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1995.

Lacayo, Richard. "The Unheard Witnesses." Time. 14 November, 1994.

Mayer, Jayne, and Jill Abramson. Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas. New York, Houghton Mifflin, 1994.

Morrison, Toni, editor. Race-ing Justice, En-Gendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Constructing of the Social Reality. Berkeley and New York, Pantheon, 1992.

Phelps, Timothy M., and Helen Winternitz. Capitol Games: Clarence Thomas, Anita Hill, and the Story of A Supreme Court Nomination. New York, Hyperion, 1992.

Totenberg, Nina, and Anita Miller, editors. The Complete Transcript of the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill Hearings: October 11, 12, 13, 1991. Chicago, Academy-Chicago Pub., 1994.