A Conservative Black Picked for High Court : Judiciary: Bush names Clarence Thomas, 43, a judge on the District of Columbia’s U.S. Court of Appeals. Stormy battle on confirmation is expected.

President Bush announced Monday that he will nominate Clarence Thomas, 43, a conservative black judge with a controversial record on civil rights, to replace Thurgood Marshall, the Supreme Court’s foremost advocate of civil rights for a quarter-century.

The nomination sets the stage for what is expected to be a stormy Senate confirmation battle, with hearings probably scheduled for September.

Thomas, a judge on the District of Columbia’s U.S. Court of Appeals who grew up in a sharecropper’s shack in Georgia and went on to graduate from Yale Law School and to serve as a top official in the Ronald Reagan Administration, said that he was “honored and humbled” to be nominated.

“As a child, I could not dare dream that I would ever see the Supreme Court, not to mention be nominated,” he said, overcome with emotion while standing beside Bush for the announcement outside the President’s home in Kennebunkport, Me.

Thomas said that his most vivid childhood memory of the Supreme Court “was the ‘Impeach Earl Warren’ signs” that lined Highway 17 near his boyhood home in Savannah.

“I didn’t quite understand who this Earl Warren fellow was,” he said, referring to the then-chief justice of the United States, who shaped the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision ordering the end to school desegregation. “But I knew he was in some kind of trouble.”

Thomas, a Roman Catholic who once studied for the priesthood, choked up as he thanked “those who have helped me along the way . . . especially my grandparents, my mother and the nuns, all of whom were adamant that I grow up to make something of myself. I also thank my wonderful wife and my wonderful son.”

Conservatives hailed the appointment, but it came under immediate attack from civil rights and allied groups because of Thomas’ outspoken conservative views on civil rights--including opposition to job quotas, busing for desegregation and equal pay for women.

Critics also have accused him of being insensitive on issues of age discrimination.

Nevertheless, Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) predicted that Thomas will easily win confirmation and said that “anybody who takes him on in the area of civil rights is taking on the grandson of a sharecropper.”

Sen. John C. Danforth (R-Mo.), for whom Thomas once worked as a legislative assistant, called him “outstanding in every respect.” Danforth, who also was Thomas’ boss when the senator served as Missouri’s attorney general, will lead the fight for Senate confirmation.

But even before Bush’s announcement, civil rights groups were warning that they would regard Thomas as unacceptable and a senior White House official said that, while Bush’s selection would be “a gutsy choice,” it would touch off “one hell of a confirmation fight.”

Arthur Kropp, president of the People for the American Way Action Fund, attacked Thomas’ “dismal record on civil rights,” and Ralph G. Neas, executive director of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, noted that many of the coalition’s 185 organizations “expressed serious concerns about Clarence Thomas’s civil rights enforcement record while he was a member of the Reagan and Bush administrations.”

Sens. Alan Cranston (D-Calif.) and Howard M. Metzenbaum (D-Ohio) said that they would press Thomas to disclose his views on privacy and abortion, and Cranston declared: “I don’t want my vote to contribute to an increasingly large and conservative anti-choice majority on the Supreme Court.”

But the most scathing assessment of the choice came not from a Democratic activist, but from William Schneider, one of Washington’s most astute political observers and a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think-tank. He called the nomination “a worse-than-tokenism choice.”

“It is an effort to divide the black community,” Schneider told the White House Bulletin, a private publication, “and I imagine that blacks will close ranks against him. The cynicism of this choice--the white man’s Negro--may be transparent. It could backfire. Liberals will once again argue that the President is using race for political advantage and that he is not really committed to a civil rights agenda.”

In making his selection, sources said, Bush had narrowed the list on Saturday to Thomas and U. S. 5th Circuit Court Judge Emilio M. Garza, 43, of San Antonio, one of three Latinos who sources said were on a “short list” of contenders to replace Marshall.

Garza had flown from San Antonio to Washington Saturday to be interviewed by Atty. Gen. Dick Thornburgh and White House counsel C. Boyden Gray. Several Administration sources had said that they expected Bush to make his mark on history by naming Garza the first Latino Supreme Court justice.

Asked why he selected Thomas over Garza, Bush said that “experience in government, experience on the higher court figured into this but . . . that should not degrade Garza at all. The man is a very well-qualified individual. . . . I just had to make a very rough call and I did it.”

Some critics accused Bush of playing politics by floating the names of Latinos as possible nominees. Former Democratic Party Chairman John White called the nomination “just too cute politically, dancing with the Hispanics and then making a late date with the blacks. I don’t think anybody’s going to fall for it and, from what I hear, it’ll be a nice little summer brawl.”

The Senate has confirmed Thomas for four lesser posts during the last decade, including confirming him as a circuit judge last year--by a vote of 98 to 2--and Bush said that he expects Thomas to have little difficulty being confirmed for the Supreme Court “if everyone’s as fair as I think they will be.”

He said that Thomas had “excelled in everything he has attempted” and that he was “satisfied that this man will pass muster.”

The President said that any concerns about Thomas’ record on civil rights and his alleged insensitivity to the problems of age discrimination should have been answered at the confirmation hearings for his appointment as a circuit court judge.

But critics said that, since the stakes are much higher for a Supreme Court nomination, Thomas’ record as chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission for seven years--in both the Bush and Reagan administrations--and his record as assistant secretary of education for civil rights for two years in the Reagan Administration, will be much more closely examined this time.

Benjamin L. Hooks, executive director of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People, said that the NAACP “will review his record again, in even greater detail” before announcing its position on Thomas.

Hooks, who earlier had predicted “the mother of all confirmation battles” if Bush nominated someone unacceptable to the NAACP, noted that his organization had said that “another African-American should be appointed to this position” but made it clear that “it should be someone who embodies many of the attributes Justice Marshall so ably articulated.”

Thomas has been especially vocal in denouncing quotas or goals and timetables to combat job bias, which he has called “a sideshow in the war on discrimination.”

In a 1987 article in the Yale Law and Policy Review, he wrote: “I continue to believe that distributing opportunities on the basis of race or gender, whoever the beneficiaries, turns the law against employment discrimination on its head. Class preferences are an affront to the rights and dignity of individuals--both those individuals who are directly disadvantaged by them, and those who are their supposed beneficiaries.

“I think that preferential hiring on the basis of race or gender will increase racial divisiveness, disempower women and minorities by fostering the notion that they are permanently disabled and in need of handouts and delay the day when skin and color and gender are truly the least important things about a person in the employment context.”

Conservatives began pressing hard for Thomas’ nomination late last week after several Administration sources told reporters that they thought Bush was leaning toward appointing a Latino.

One source familiar with Bush’s selection process said that Thomas “was probably the leading candidate from the beginning” to replace Marshall. And if a seat other than Marshall’s had become vacant, the source said, Thomas would have been one of several leading candidates.

Transcripts of the Senate confirmation hearings for Thomas’ circuit judgeship had been reviewed at length, the source said, and “frankly I would be surprised if the Senate found anything (this time) that they didn’t know at the time of his confirmation to the appeals court.”

At Monday’s press conference, Bush said that Thomas was the best-qualified of all the prospective nominees he had considered and insisted that the fact he is black “had nothing to do with” his selection. The President bristled at the suggestion that race was a factor in the selection.

However, an Administration source familiar with Bush’s selection process told The Times that after Marshall announced his retirement last week, Bush went over a list of 12 to 14 prospective nominees, then told aides he wanted the names of all white males removed.

That left about eight persons who were members of minority groups or women. Others included on the pared-down list, sources said, included U.S. 9th Circuit Judge Ferdinand F. Fernandez, 54, of Los Angeles; U.S. District Court Judge Ricardo H. Hinojosa, 41, of Brownsville, Tex.; Judge Amalya L. Kearse, 54, a black, of the U.S. Circuit Court in New York, and U.S. District Judge Jose A. Cabranes of Connecticut.

Staff writers Ronald J. Ostrow in Washington and Sam Fulwood III in Kennebunkport, Me., contributed to this story.

New Supreme Court Nominee: Clarence Thomas

The Nominee:

Born June 23, 1948, in Savannah, Ga. Raised by his grandparents. Was graduated from Holy Cross College in Worcester, Mass., in 1971 with a bachelor of arts. Earned law degree from Yale University in 1974. Served as assistant attorney general, State of Missouri, 1974-77; attorney for Monsanto Co., Washington, D. C., 1977-79; legislative aide to Sen. John C. Danforth (R-Mo.), 1979-81; assistant secretary of Education for civil rights, 1981-82; chairman, U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, 1982-1990; judge, U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.

Impact on the Court:

Analysts say the nomination of Thomas, who is a conservative ideologically, is expected to solidify the high court’s conservative majority, which would then prevail by a 7-2 margin instead of the 6-3 margin that prevailed before.

Prospects for confirmation:

Huge battle likely as Democrats prepare to attack Thomas’ relative inexperience and record on civil rights and press him to declare his views on the abortion issue.

Key quotation of the day:

Asked what he would say to critics who contend that in view of his limited experience on the bench, the only reason he was being picked is that he is black: “I think a lot worse things have been said. I disagree with that, but I’ll have to live with it.”