Thomas’ Rise Inspires Friends, Irks Liberals : Nominee: The judge as a toddler had lived in a sharecropper’s shack. Critics say he turned his back on the less fortunate in climb from rags to Republicanism.

WASHINGTON —  Clarence Thomas was 7 years old when he first moved to a home with indoor toilets and running water.

As a toddler, he had lived in a sharecropper’s shack outside of Savannah, Ga., with an aunt and uncle. Their water came from a common pump and was carried into the house in buckets. For a time, too, Thomas lived with his mother and brother in one room off an alley in Savannah. There, in 1954, he started school in an all-black elementary school--the same year that the Supreme Court outlawed segregation in the public schools.

But that landmark decision had almost no direct impact on Thomas’ life.

Rather, his circumstances changed the next year. His father having abandoned the family to go North, young Clarence Thomas was sent to live with his grandparents. Myers Anderson, his grandfather, earned a living delivering ice and oil. During the day, he sent young Clarence to an all-black Catholic school where he was taught by white nuns. Promptly at 3 p.m., the youngster went to work with his grandfather.

On Monday, the 43-year-old Supreme Court nominee choked up for a moment as he gave thanks to the grandparents and nuns who started him on the road toward the nation’s highest court.

“As a child, I could not dare dream that I would ever see the Supreme Court, not to mention be nominated for it,” Thomas said as he stood next to President Bush. “I thank all those who 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.”

Clarence Thomas’ rise from rags to Republicanism sets forth a tale that inspires conservatives, but irks liberals and civil-rights advocates.

Having grown up poor and made it on his own, Thomas has proclaimed that hard work and individual effort, not government help and affirmative action, are the key to success for blacks.

“What can a (liberal Sen.) Ted Kennedy tell Clarence Thomas about equal opportunity in this country?” mused William J. Bennett, the education secretary in the Ronald Reagan Administration and a friend of Thomas’.

But liberals say that Thomas in his ambitious quest for power has turned his back on the less fortunate and embraced the strict conservatism of the Republican right wing.

“On civil-rights issues, Judge Thomas is closer to (former attorney general) Ed Meese than to Thurgood Marshall,” says Arthur Kropp, president of People for the American Way, a liberal organization.

Over the next three months, Thomas’ life and his views will be dissected by the media, legal interest groups and the Democratic-controlled Senate Judiciary Committee. His experience as a federal judge is thin--only 15 months on an appeals court--and his tenure at the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission was controversial.

But the assessment of Thomas will begin with a life story that contains a unique blend of black separatism and Republican conservatism.

Through his first nine years of school, Thomas studied only with other black students. But in the 10th grade, he was enrolled in the St. John Vianney Minor Seminary near Savannah, a Catholic boarding school. There, he was the only black student.

He was an altar boy and a football player who excelled academically. He was graduated at the top of his class and enrolled in the Immaculate Conception Seminary in Missouri, with the intention of becoming a priest.

But Thomas changed his plans on April 4, 1968, the day Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was shot and killed in Memphis. For a time, he had seethed over racist jokes told by white seminarians. But when the news of King’s shooting reached his dormitory, one white student responded: “Good, I hope the son-of-a-bitch dies.”

Angered and alienated, Thomas dropped out of the seminary and returned home. After working for a time, he enrolled in Holy Cross College in Massachusetts. He was attracted to Malcolm X, the Black Panthers and the black militancy of the late 1960s. He led a free-breakfast program for black school children and urged a black walkout to protest the college’s investments in South Africa.

But Thomas did not ignore his school work. He excelled in class and paid his way through a combination of scholarships and by working in a kitchen.

At Yale law school, “he did not want to be identified as a black student--one who perhaps had been admitted and must be coddled precisely because he was black,” wrote Juan Williams in an Atlantic magazine profile of Thomas. He studied tax law, antitrust and property law. He avoided civil rights courses.

In 1974, Thomas went to work for then-Missouri Atty. Gen. John C. Danforth, now a Republican member of the U.S. Senate. The young law graduate said later that he was attracted to Danforth because the Missouri official treated him like any other young law graduate, not like a black law graduate. The attorney general put him to work on criminal and tax matters, not civil rights.

“Danforth was a good guy--he ignored the hell out of me,” Thomas once said.

When Danforth came to Washington, Thomas came with him--as an aide on energy and the environment.

Thomas quickly attracted attention in the nation’s capital. He was a conservative Republican, and one who was willing to denounce welfare, busing and affirmative action, to boot. He made clear that he wanted no part of the traditional liberal formulas on civil rights.

“Race-conscious remedies in this society are dangerous,” Thomas once said. “You can’t orchestrate society along racial lines or different lines by saying there should be 10% blacks, 15% Hispanics.”

Not surprisingly, officials of the new Ronald Reagan Administration were interested in Thomas, but for the civil rights posts that he had earlier disdained. Eventually, however, he accepted a civil rights job at the Department of Education.

In 1982, Reagan chose the 33-year-old Thomas to head the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the agency charged with enforcing federal anti-discrimination laws. There, Thomas angered advocates for women’s rights and the elderly, who thought that he seemed to assume that discrimination no longer existed.

Those critics were conspicuous when Bush announced that he would nominate Thomas to the Supreme Court. Lawrence T. Smedley, executive director of the National Council of Senior Citizens, issued a statement calling Thomas’ appointment “a sad day for older workers, for minorities and for women.”

And Sen. Paul Simon (D-Ill.), a longtime Thomas critic, said that the nominee’s views on civil rights would far outweigh his remarkable success story. “The background of Judge Clarence Thomas is less important than his views and what they mean to protecting our constitutional rights,” Simon said. “As head of a key civil rights enforcement agency, he seemed to go out of his way to find ways to weaken some of the basic civil rights protections that his agency was charged with enforcing. My basic concern is whether he will champion the rights of all Americans, including the powerless in our society.”

Though Thomas angered Democrats on Capitol Hill, he was seen as a rising star within Republican ranks. With one eye to preparing a possible replacement for Justice Thurgood Marshall, Bush nominated Thomas in 1989 to the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, often labeled the nation’s second most powerful court.

At his confirmation hearings, Thomas proved an articulate and able witness before the Senate Judiciary Committee and was easily approved.

On civil rights, the Thomas nomination presents liberals with a dilemma: As liberals, they advocate equal opportunity for all--and especially for minorities. If they oppose Thomas, they risk being accused of denying opportunity to a member of a minority group.

Senate Democrats predicted that Thomas will be grilled about his views on civil rights and pressured to reveal his views on abortion during hearings before the Judiciary Committee. Privately, they used words such as “very intense” and “contentious” to describe the hearings that Thomas will face upon his nomination.

Although most liberal Democrats and civil rights groups refrained from attacking the nomination Monday, they are expected to oppose him. Several civil rights groups said that Thomas could not fill Marshall’s shoes.

Meanwhile, conservatives such as Richard Viguerie said that they would not permit Thomas to be defeated by “bigotry” on the part of liberals.

On the abortion issue, Sens. Alan Cranston (D-Calif.) and Howard M. Metzenbaum (D-Ohio) said they will insist that Thomas declare his views before being confirmed.