Every Black History Month Celebration Should Honor American Hero Clarence Thomas

This Black History Month is an excellent opportunity for Americans to celebrate the inspiring life and jurisprudence of Justice Clarence Thomas, the second black Supreme Court justice in our nation’s history (and now the 11th longest-serving justice in history) and the intellectual leader of the Supreme Court. 

Justice Thomas is our greatest living American. But the left and its media allies will continue to ignore or defame Thomas because they have manufactured a ridiculous narrative that Thomas does not think the way a black man ought to think. In the left’s worldview, your skin color determines how you must think. Of course, this is racist, and the left’s narrative is a lie. 

From the Depths of Poverty and Despair

But first, let’s focus on a truly remarkable American life. Thomas was born in 1948 into abject poverty in Pin Point, Georgia, just outside of Savannah, where segregation ruled the day. His father abandoned the family when Thomas was 2, leaving his mom, who was uneducated and working as a maid for white families and at the nearby oyster factory, to struggle to raise three children. 

By the grace of God, Thomas’ mother asked her parents to help, and Thomas and his brother went to live with his grandparents. His grandfather enrolled the boys in the segregated all-black Catholic elementary school. Those two developments changed Thomas’ life, as his grandfather and the Irish nuns at St. Benedict’s held young Clarence to the highest standards and expectations, teaching him the virtues of hard work and perseverance, and did not accept any excuses. 

With those skills, Thomas excelled through school at every level, despite being the only black student at a just-desegregated high school seminary. In his college years, and especially at Holy Cross, Thomas embraced black nationalism, and as he has described, “racism and race explained everything.” But Thomas soon concluded this was not the answer and began his journey back to where he started in the Catholic Church. He embraced a philosophy that focused on individual rather than group rights.