My Grandfather's Son: A Memoir
by Clarence Thomas
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Book Summary Information
Author: Clarence ThomasBrand: Harper Collins Publishers
Edition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2007-10-01
ISBN: 0060565551
Number of pages: 304
Publisher: Harper
Book Reviews of My Grandfather's Son: A Memoir
Book Review: Marvelous and sadly revealing
Summary: 5 Stars
You should put this book on your "Must Read" list. It's perhaps the most moving and honest autobiography I've read in many a year. And since I was growing up in the segregated South at the same time Justice Thomas was, it's inspired me to complete a book I began long ago about my own experiences with that great evil. The two should complement one another quite well, since both challenge the stereotyping of Southerners, white and black, so common in the media.
Clarence Thomas' book focuses on the influence his grandfather had on his experience growing up. My book will place an emphasis on my paternal grandmother's side of the family, the Hallmarks. Five of her ancestors were murdered during the Civil War for opposing what they considered the "rich man's war, a poor man's fight" for slavery. Two were murdered during the war in NW Alabama by proto-Klan groups. Two died serving with the First Alabama Calvary U.S. Those last two letters of that name mean a lot. These were Southern men, mostly from Alabama, Mississippi and Tennessee, who fought for the Union. Their most notably achievement was in providing the calvary screen for Sherman's march across Georgia. (That, I tell friends, is perhaps the most treasonous behavior in human history, and one I hardily approve of.) The final death was my great-great-great-grandfather, who seems to have been murdered by the Klan in 1874, as part of the Democratic Party's vow to retake the South and establish white supremacy "By Ballots or by Bullets." I like to think that it's from them I got my attitude of refusing to be intimidated.
Unfortunately, for all its merits, Thomas' book also reveals an unfortunate and still lingering result of those years of slavery and segregation, one that's imbedded deeply in the psyche of almost all black people. Slave-owners and segregationists did not fear the "uppity" black individual. They knew they could deal with him precisely like they dealt with Thomas himself during his Supreme Court confirmation hearings--with a lynching that was either physical or verbal. What they feared most was that black people would begin to work together toward a common goal much like the Irish did through the Catholic Church or the Jews did (and do) through their various organizations. They feared bold, intelligent community self-help, not just the individual self-help of Thomas' impressive grandfather. That's one in which every black was expected to take a part. As long as you're looking to someone else for help, white liberals for instance, you remain a slave to their desires and their wishes. Cross them and they will destroy you, as they tried to do with Thomas.
With the notable exception of the Civil Rights era from the mid-1950s to mid-1960s, that is one of the most prominent distinguishing marks of our black subculture. It was in that era, with Civil Rights movement being lead primarily by black preachers, that much of the present hostility toward religious activism in politics began. If you doubt that, ask yourself what was the worst thing to happen to Democratic party liberalism in its history. The answer is the civil rights movement. Before it, FDR liberals ran Congress because a "Solid South" that was Democratic gave them a majority. In exchange, the party's liberals were careful to keep their opposition to segregation all talk and no deeds. When President Eisenhower pushed through voter's rights legislation in 1957, LBJ made sure that those charged with depriving blacks of the right to vote would have a local (and all white) jury that would never convict. Those black preachers, mostly Baptist, AME, and Pentecostal, ended that convenient deception, actually putting an end to segregation and a solidly Democratic South, hence liberal hostility toward preachers of all colors, unless they're the sort that's easily corrupted. (Think Jesse Jackson.)
Where within the black community are the lively debates about 'what we should do,' that take place among Jews? Because there is no community that acts, there's no community that debates what should be done. And what are America's wealthy (on a world scale) blacks doing about the AIDS crisis in Africa? From what I've seen, most of the efforts to help African children orphaned by AIDS are coming from white Catholics and Evangelicals. Jews lobby vigorously for US aid to Israel, a country that's hardly impoverished. American blacks rarely seem to talk about Africa and the black elite seems mostly interested in maintaining quotas that make it easier for their children to get into prestigious schools. If the slave owners of long ago were to look at what passes for "community" among blacks, they'd be delighted at what they'd done.
In the late 1980s, I had an interesting conversation about abortion with a very liberal Seattle-area English professor who was a strong Planned Parenthood supporter. At one point in our conversation he resorted to what he undoubtedly considered the 'clincher' argument for legalized abortion. Pointing at a young black man nearby and lowering his voice to a conspiratorial whisper, he said, "That's why we need legalized abortion." And all you have to do is look at the statistics to see he's right. Black abortion rates are much higher than those of whites. Even more important, given the absence of any government mandates about informed consent and alternatives, black women will continue to receive a different sort of pre-abortion counseling than white women. I had a friend who told a black woman about to get an abortion that the same Medicaid coupon a social worker had given her for the abortion would get her prenatal care. That's all it took to change her mind.
Yet what is Thomas' response to all that? He whines that the Catholic church is doing more for the 'fetus' than it did for blacks in his youth. That's despite the fact that the Catholic church has yet to have the guts to expel a single, abortion-supporting politician and despite the fact that the great bulk of the quality education he got as a black under segregation was through the Catholic church. Talk about being ungrateful!
And what is likely to be his "compromise" solution about abortion? My guess would be that he'd toss out Roe in some anemic way refuses to admit that the Supreme Court got it wrong morally in 1973. Then abortion would become a "state's rights" issue much like segregation was after Plessey v. Ferguson (1892), rather than a human rights issue it really is.
It's difficult to find the right words to describe a talented, educated black who grew up under segregation and who nevertheless finds state's rights argument that dehumanize and kill and acceptable argument for anything. After all, thinking differently isn't that hard. My earliest political memory came in the first grade when I looked across the playground of my all-white elementary school at some not-quite-school-age black kids who were playing in their parent's front yard. In another year I knew they'd be going to an all-black school across town. "That's stupid," I thought to myself. I did that as a small kid who didn't know anything about a world without segregation, who had never read any contrary argument to what was for me the entire world. If I could do that, then Clarence Thomas, living in an educated and literate world where abortion is hotly debated, can certainly do better. He can think, he can read, he can study, he can develop a point of view that can be defended, not hide behind state's rights.
During his confirmation hearings, many thought it a bit odd that Thomas claimed he done almost no thinking about Roe v. Wade. Many years later, and safely seated on the Supreme Court, this "see no evil" approach to abortion borders on the bizarre. He needs to consider one important fact. As long as there's a single fear that dominates your life in that way, you are not free. Thomas is a good, decent and intelligent man. But because he refuses to face the defining issue of his generation and mine, he remains as much a slave as his ancestors.
--Michael W. Perry, editor of The Pivot of Civilization in Historical Perspective: The Birth Control Classic and Eugenics and Other Evils : An Argument Against the Scientifically Organized State
Summary of My Grandfather's Son: A Memoir
Provocative, inspiring, and unflinchingly honest, My Grandfather's Son is the story of one of America's most remarkable and controversial leaders, Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas, told in his own words.
Thomas was born in rural Georgia on June 23, 1948, into a life marked by poverty and hunger. His parents divorced when Thomas was still a baby, and his father moved north to Philadelphia, leaving his young mother to raise him and his brother and sister on the ten dollars a week she earned as a maid. At age seven, Thomas and his six-year-old brother were sent to live with his mother's father, Myers Anderson, and her stepmother in their Savannah home. It was a move that would forever change Thomas's life.
His grandfather, whom he called "Daddy," was a black man with a strict work ethic, trying to raise a family in the years of Jim Crow. Thomas witnessed his grandparents' steadfastness despite injustices, their hopefulness despite bigotry, and their deep love for their country. His own quiet ambition would propel him to Holy Cross and Yale Law School, and eventually?despite a bitter, highly contested public confirmation?to the highest court in the land. In this candid and deeply moving memoir, a quintessential American tale of hardship and grit, Clarence Thomas recounts his astonishing journey for the first time, and pays homage to the man who made it possible.
Intimately and eloquently, Thomas speaks out, revealing the pieces of his life he holds dear, detailing the suffering and injustices he has overcome, including the acrimonious and polarizing Senate hearing involving a former aide, Anita Hill, and the depression and despair it created in his own life and the lives of those closest to him. My Grandfather's Son is the story of a determined man whose faith, courage, and perseverance inspired him to rise up against all odds and achieve his dreams.
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