What Clarence Thomas Told Us in Texas

When Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas took the stage recently at the University of Texas at Austin to deliver a speech marking the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, more than a few law students in the audience were well aware that the late Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall had given a similar address marking the 200th anniversary of the Constitution in 1987.  

Marshall’s speech is required reading in most law school classes, and many believe that Thomas’s UT speech will be too, perhaps as a rebuttal to Marshall, the first black man to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court, who called the Constitution “defective from the start.” Thomas, the second black man appointed to the high court to replace him, called the Declaration of Independence, “the greatest anti-slavery document of Western civilization.”

Marshall declared that the work of the founders “was not particularly profound,” and viewed the founding documents as compromised from the outset. His speech provided an extensive justification for ongoing judicial activism to correct flaws and failures in the Constitution.  

Thomas destroyed the premise of Marshall’s conclusion without ever mentioning his name. He described the Constitution as the “means of government,” and proclaimed that the moral principles expressed in the Declaration of Independence—that all men are created equal and that our rights come from God, not government—are the genius of the document.  

Thomas said our calling as Americans is to live those principles, not revise them.  

His speech rankled progressive thinkers. The Daily Beast headline called Thomas’ address an “Unhinged Rant,” because it is a direct challenge to those who have spent the last several decades inculcating young people with the belief that America was founded because of slavery (The 1619 Project) and that racism is systemically woven into the fabric of every American institution. The contemporary progressive movement is built on identity politics and a hierarchy of grievances dictated by the “lived experiences” of the “oppressed.”  

But the authenticity of Clarence Thomas’s “lived experiences” is unimpeachable. After his parents died, Thomas was reared by his grandparents. His grandfather was born in 1897, just 32 years after Emancipation. Thomas is not only descended from slaves, but slavery was also in the “living memory” of Thomas’ family and community growing up, and the legal racism of Jim Crow laws was the reality that defined Thomas’ early life.  

Thomas called progressivism “the first mainstream political movement — with the possible exception of the pro-slavery reactionaries on the eve of the Civil War — to openly oppose the principles of the Declaration of Independence.” He named former President Woodrow Wilson as the architect of progressivism.  

The fact that Wilson did not believe that “all men are created equal,” over a hundred years ago, has led, Justice Thomas explains, to many evils in American government. Wilson himself would reinstitute segregation in the federal government workforce. We might point to one of the most obnoxious errors in our time in the left progressive embrace of Ibram X. Kendi’s anti-racism, which sanctions a new kind of racism, declaring that the only remedy for racial discrimination is more discrimination.    

Rather than segregation and unlimited centralized power, Thomas links the Declaration and the Constitution together:

The Constitution achieves this purpose by protecting our natural rights and liberties from concentrated power and excessive democracy. Our Constitution creates a separation of powers and federalism—truly for the first time in modern history—to prevent the government from becoming so strong that it threatens our natural rights.  

In 1987, Marshall’s speech was regarded as visionary, while Thomas’s address, fifty years later, is deemed controversial, even dangerous. After Thomas completed his speech, a University of Texas student asked him why he had chosen a legal career. Without hesitation, Thomas answered, “segregation.” He said he’d always known that enforced racial division violated the country’s first principles, so he set out to master the tools he would need to dismantle the injustice—the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.  

Sherry Sylvester is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Texas Public Policy Foundation and the former Senior Advisor to Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick.

Read Justice Clarence Thomas’s full remarks here.