Text: If Not for Others, ‘I Would Not Be Here’

Here is the text of Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas’ statement Tuesday before the Senate Judiciary Committee during his confirmation hearings:

Mr. Chairman, Sen. Thurmond, members of the committee. I am humbled and honored to have been nominated by President Bush to be an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States.

I would like to thank the committee, especially you, Chairman Biden, for your extraordinary fairness throughout this process. And I would like to thank each of you and so many of your colleagues here in the Senate for taking the time to visit with me.

There are not enough words to express my deep gratitude and appreciation to Sen. Danforth, who gave me my first job out of Yale Law School. I have never forgotten the terms of his offer to me: more work for less pay than anyone in the country could offer. Believe me, he delivered on his promise, especially the less pay. I appreciate his wise counsel and his example over the years and his tireless efforts on my behalf during the confirmation process.

And I’d like to thank Sens. Bond, Nunn, Fowler, Warner and Robb for taking the time to introduce me today.

What Makes Me Tick

Much has been written about my family and me over the past 10 weeks. Through all that has happened throughout our lives and through all adversity, we’ve grown closer, and our love for each other has grown stronger and deeper. I hope these hearings will help to show more clearly who this person Clarence Thomas is and what really makes me tick.

My earliest memories are those of Pin Point, Ga., a life far removed in space and time from this room, this day and this moment. As kids, we caught minnows in the creeks, fiddler crabs in the marshes; we played with plovers and skipped shells across the water. It was a world so vastly different from all this.

In 1955, my brother and I went to live with my mother in Savannah. We lived in one room in a tenement; we shared a kitchen with other tenants, and we had a common bathroom in the back yard which was unworkable and unusable. It was hard, but it was all we had and all there was.

Our mother only earned $20 every two weeks as a maid, not enough to take care of us, so she arranged for us to live with our grandparents later in 1955. Imagine, if you will, two little boys with all their belongings in two grocery bags. Our grandparents were two great and wonderful people who loved us dearly. I wish they were sitting here today, sitting here so that they could see that all their efforts, their hard work were not in vain, and so that they could see that hard work and strong values can make for a better life. I am grateful that my mother and my sister could be here. Unfortunately, my brother could not be.

Nuns Gave Hope

I attended segregated parochial schools and later attended a seminary near Savannah. The nuns gave us hope and belief in ourselves when society didn’t. They reinforced the importance of religious beliefs in our personal lives. Sister Mary Virgilius, my eighth-grade teacher, and the other nuns were unyielding in their expectations that we use all of our talents, no matter what the rest of the world said or did.

After high school, I left Savannah and attended Immaculate Conception Seminary, then Holy Cross College. I attended Yale Law School. Yale had opened its doors, its heart, its conscience to recruit and admit minority students. I benefited from this effort.

My career is as delineated today. I was an assistant attorney general in the state of Missouri. I was an attorney in the corporate law department of Monsanto Co. I joined Sen. Danforth’s staff here in the Senate, was an assistant secretary in the Department of Education, chairman of EEOC, and since 1990 a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia circuit.

Efforts of Others

But for the efforts of so many others who have gone before me, I would not be here today. It would be unimaginable. Only by standing on their shoulders could I be here. At each turn in my life, each obstacle confronted, each fork in the road, someone came along to help.

I remember, for example, in 1974, after I completed law school, I had no money, no place to live. Mrs. Margaret Bush Wilson, who would later become chairperson of the NAACP, allowed me to live at her house. She provided me not only with room and board, but advice, counsel and guidance. As I left her house that summer, I asked her: “How much do I owe you?” Her response was: “Just along the way, help someone who is in your position.”

I have tried to live by my promise to her to do just that--to help others. So many others gave their lives, their blood, their talents. But for them I would not be here.

Justice Marshall, whose seat I’ve been nominated to fill, is one of those who had the courage and the intellect. He’s one of the great architects of the legal battles to open doors that seemed so hopelessly and permanently sealed, and to knock down barriers that seemed so insurmountable to those of us in the Pin Point, Georgias, of the world.

The civil rights movement--Rev. Martin Luther King and the SCLC, Roy Wilkins and the NAACP, Whitney Young and the Urban League, Fannie Lou Hamer, Rosa Parks and Dorothy Height. They changed society and made it reach out and affirmatively help. I have benefited greatly from their efforts. But for them, there would have been no road to travel.

Obligation to Work Hard

My grandparents always said there would be more opportunities for us. I can still hear my grandfather: “Y’all goin’ to have mo’ of a chance than me.” And he was right. He felt that, if others sacrificed and created opportunities for us, we had an obligation to work hard, to be decent citizens, to be fair and good people. And he was right.

You see, Mr. Chairman, my grandparents grew up and lived their lives in an era of blatant segregation and overt discrimination.

Their sense of fairness was molded in a crucible of unfairness. I watched as my grandfather was called “boy.” I watched as my grandmother suffered the indignity of being denied the use of a bathroom. But through it all, they remained fair, decent, good people--fair in spite of the terrible contradictions in our country. They were hard-working, productive people who always gave back to others. They gave produce from the farm, fuel oil from the fuel-oil truck; they bought groceries for those who were without.

And they never lost sight of the promise of a better tomorrow. I follow in their footsteps and I have always tried to give back.

Believing in Values

Over the years I have grown and matured. I have learned to listen carefully, carefully to other points of views and to others; to think through problems recognizing there are no easy answers to difficult problems; to think deeply about those who will be affected by the decisions that I make and the decisions made by others.

But I have always carried in my heart the world, the life, the people, the values of my youth, the values of my grandparents and my neighbors, the values of people who believed so very deeply in this country in spite of all the contradictions.

It is my hope that, when these hearings are completed, that this committee will conclude that I am an honest, decent, fair person. I believe that the obligations and responsibilities of a judge in essence involve just such basic values.

A judge must be fair and impartial. A judge must not bring to his job, to the court, the baggage of preconceived notions, of ideology, and certainly not an agenda. And a judge must get the decision right because, when all is said and done, the little guy, the average person, the people of Pin Point, the real people of America will be affected not only by what we as judges do, but by the way we do our jobs.

If confirmed by the Senate, I pledge that I will preserve and protect our Constitution and carry with me the values of my heritage, fairness, integrity, open-mindedness, honesty and hard work.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.