Step by step on a path toward conservatism

Clarence Thomas grew up poor and black in the segregated South. By the time he went to college and law school in New England, he was a self-described “black radical.”

But by his mid-30s, he had transformed himself into one of the nation’s most prominent black conservatives and was on the path that would lead him to the Supreme Court.

In his new memoir, “My Grandfather’s Son,” Justice Thomas goes much further than before in describing, step by step, his growing distrust of liberals and liberalism and his embrace of Republicans and conservatism.

It began with his stern and strong-willed grandfather, who gave a home to 6-year old Clarence and his brother, Myers. “ ‘The damn vacation is over,’ Daddy had told us on the morning we moved into his house,” Thomas wrote of his grandfather. “He wouldn’t listen to any excuses for failure.”

Thomas credits his grandfather’s “no excuses” philosophy with helping him do well in school and later providing the foundation for his conservative views. But if there was a turning point in his thinking, it came during his time at Yale Law School between 1971 and 1974.

One summer, Thomas worked for a legal aid clinic in New Haven, Conn., and saw the “destructive effects” of welfare. He also was put off by the “smugness” of some of his classmates and by the “bickering and incompetent leadership” of the group.

“That summer opened my eyes,” he wrote.

He found himself surprised by the racism in the supposedly more liberal North.

“It was in Boston, not Georgia, that a white man has called me nigger for the first time,” Thomas wrote. “I bristled at the self-righteous sanctimony with which so many of the northerners at Yale glibly discussed the South’s racial problems.”

Thomas also said he was appalled at the forced busing plan ordered by a liberal judge in Boston. “As I watched TV pictures of black children being bused into south Boston, it was clear that the situation had reached the point of total absurdity,” he wrote. “What was the point of shipping those children from one rotten school to another?”

His son, Jamal, was born during that time. “I swore on the spot never to let Jamal go to a public school. . . I had no intention of allowing my son to become a guinea pig in some harebrained social experiment,” he wrote.

In one passage, he described his bitterness toward Northern liberals and the people at Yale by comparing them to types of poisonous snakes: “The Georgia rattlesnakes always let you know when they were ready to strike. Not so the paternalistic big-city whites who offered you a helping hand so long as you were careful to agree with them. . . . Like the water moccasin, they struck without warning.”

He recounted one pleasant surprise at Yale. Thomas lost his wallet, but it was turned in by “a young white man named John R. Bolton,” a fiery conservative who became a life-long friend. (In the Bush administration, Bolton was one of the hard-liners who pushed for the war in Iraq.)

In 1974, Thomas graduated from Yale, but he was unable to find a job in a law firm. The justice has sometimes described his degree as nearly worthless.

However, he was hired by then-Missouri Atty. Gen. John C. Danforth, a moderate Republican. Thomas went to work on criminal cases and said he was appalled by the “black-on-black crime rates.”

“I still thought of most imprisoned blacks as political prisoners,” Thomas wrote of himself in 1974. “What changed my mind was the case of black man convicted of raping and sodomizing a black woman in Kansas City after holding a sharp can opener at the throat of her small son. He was no political prisoner -- he was a vicious thug.”

In the mid-’70s, Thomas first encountered the writings of Thomas Sowell, perhaps the best-known black conservative of the time. “His very first words took my breath away: ‘Honesty on questions of race is rare in the United States,’ ” he wrote.

Sowell argued that the policies favored by liberals -- “job quotas, charity, subsidies, preferential treatment” -- tended to undermine minorities, Thomas wrote. Those that were espoused by conservatives have “proved successful -- self-reliance, work skills, education and business experience,” he wrote.

“I felt like a thirsty man gulping down a glass of cool water,” Thomas wrote of his encounter with Sowell’s work. “Here was a black man who was saying what I thought.”

Thomas moved to Washington when Danforth was elected to the Senate. And after Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980, Thomas was offered a post at the Department of Education. He said he asked for studies showing the value of school integration for black children.

“A staffer told me none existed. I asked why it was so widely accepted that black children were better off in integrated schools. He replied that integration had nothing to do with education: the point of busing white and black children to each other’s schools was to encourage their parents to move to those neighborhoods. I was aghast,” Thomas wrote.

By the mid-1980s, Thomas was firmly in the Republican camp. Reagan named him as chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. In 1990, President George H.W. Bush named him to the U.S. Court of Appeals. And a year later, when liberal legend Thurgood Marshall retired from the Supreme Court, Bush named Thomas to succeed him.

Since then, he has voted regularly to strike down race-based affirmative action plans and to reject appeals from criminal defendants. In June, he cast a key vote as part of a 5-4 majority to reject the use of racial guidelines to bring about school integration.

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david.savage@latimes.com