NAACP Defense Fund Says It Is Opposed to Thomas

The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, a driving force in the struggle to outlaw segregation, came out strongly Tuesday against Senate confirmation of Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas to replace retiring Justice Thurgood Marshall.

Thomas has shown an increasing “antipathy and hostility towards legal principles that benefit and protect the most disadvantaged of our society,” the legal defense fund said in announcing its opposition to the conservative black jurist.

“This disdain, if translated into Supreme Court decisions, would seriously undermine what Justice Marshall, this organization and many others have achieved in opening the doors of equal opportunity to millions of African-Americans,” it added.

Marshall was the first director of the fund, which was founded by the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People in 1940 but has been a separate organization for more than three decades. It was a legal defense fund case that resulted in the Supreme Court’s famous 1954 decision in Brown vs. Topeka Board of Education, which declared school segregation unconstitutional.

The announcement carried added weight because William T. Coleman Jr., a leading black Republican who was transportation secretary in President Gerald R. Ford’s Cabinet, is now board chairman of the fund and joined in the statement of opposition.

“Americans should see this (Thomas) nomination for what it clearly is: The most recent step in a cynical attempt to make the Supreme Court the captive of the extreme right wing of American politics,” said Julius L. Chambers, director of the fund.

The legal defense fund said that Thomas once expressed moderate views on civil rights issues, but that he underwent a sharp transformation in 1986 and “has chosen to place himself firmly in the reactionary camp.”

In another development, a newly formed conservative organization, the Citizens’ Committee to Confirm Clarence Thomas, described the nominee as an effective enforcer of civil rights laws who is in the mainstream of legal thinking.

At a Washington press conference, the organization produced two university professors who argued in support of the Thomas nomination.

Joseph Broadus, professor of law at George Mason University, charged that critics of the federal appeals court judge were employing “misrepresentations and half-truths” in a deceptive effort to block Thomas’ approval.

Russell Hittinger, a professor of philosophy at Catholic University, said that Thomas’ support for a “natural law” legal doctrine did not put him outside the mainstream of legal thinking in the United States.

Hittinger said that Thomas, like Marshall in his arguments before the Supreme Court on the school desegregation case, merely believed that the rule of law requires a moral component.

“Clarence Thomas would broaden opinion of the (Supreme) court on certain civil rights cases,” Hittinger added. “He has an independent mind . . . and is not just another conservative like we have now (on the court).”

Thomas, who has kept a low profile recently, is scheduled to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Sept. 10.