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Alumni Success Stories

Clarence Thomas '71

Clarence Thomas ’71

Clarence Thomas ’71 found an unexpected role model at Holy Cross. Thomas, associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, credits his Readings in Renaissance Prose course with introducing him to Sir Thomas More (1478-1535), the Catholic lawyer and counselor to King Henry VIII who was executed for opposing the king’s break with Rome. Thomas calls More a lifelong “hero and a role model” for his character and principled dignity. Further, he cites Professor Emeritus Thomas Lawler, who taught this course, along with other Holy Cross faculty members, for helping find his way through the tumultuous late ’60s. “They refused to accommodate my feelings; they demanded that I think rather than feel,” says Thomas.

Thomas transferred to Holy Cross in the fall of 1968 from Immaculate Conception Seminary, where he was studying for the priesthood when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated the previous April. As he explains, “How could I stay at the seminary when the world seemed to be disintegrating around me? It seemed to be pointless. All that religion and education had seemed to promise no longer mattered to me.”

At Holy Cross, Thomas reclaimed his belief in education and went on to earn his law degree at Yale. Before being named to the Supreme Court in 1991, he served in several government positions, including assistant secretary for civil rights within the U.S. Department of Education, chairman of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

 

Photograph by Steve Petteway, Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States