THOMAS' FIERCE INDEPENDENCE IS AT HEART OF HIS CONSERVATISM
Yet in a matter of weeks, Thomas goes before the Senate Judiciary Committee as President Bush's nominee to join the increasingly conservative Supreme Court.;   Thomas' dramatic political and philosophical transformation reveals more about the man than does his Horatio Alger journey from rural Southern poverty to Supreme Court nomination. To friends, his is a story of courage, to foes, a story of opportunism.;   Racial anger, protest lyrics; The homespun homilies of his grandfather, the ruler-slapping discipline of the nuns who taught him at a Catholic school in segregated Savannah, Ga., the racial anger in the writings of Richard Wright and Malcolm X, the iconoclastic theories of such academicians as Thomas Sowell and William Barclay Allen, even the protest lyrics of singer-songwriter Nina Simone -- all are parts of the story.;   As glimpsed in dozens of interviews and tens of thousands of pages of documents that Thomas has turned over to the Senate Judiciary Committee, these influences helped shape a set of beliefs that are now the subject of bitter controversy.;   Thomas takes immense pride in having staked out an independent course despite suffering what he said was a heavy personal toll in lost friends and public condemnation.;   Black 'intellectual clones'; "I refuse to submit to the racially derogatory orthodoxy which says that all blacks should share the same opinion on . . . affirmative action, busing or welfare. . . . I believe it is racist to act as though blacks are intellectual clones," he said in a 1984 speech to black students at Yale Law School, where he earned his law degree.;   Thomas underscores his role as a minority figure within a minority by repeatedly quoting Robert Frost's poetic recollection: "Two roads diverged in a wood, and I -- I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.";   Even his close friends have trouble explaining why Thomas took a different road.;   As a youth, Clarence Thomas shared the liberal attitudes of many bright young black people who were born into a segregated America and came of age after freedom rides, lunch room sit-ins and the 1964 Civil Rights Act began erasing the overt signs of racial discrimination.;   As a Holy Cross College student in the turbulent 1960s, he joined black protesters, wore a beret and a leather jacket, and decorated his dormitory room with a poster of Malcolm X.;   But Thomas came to see his college years as wrongheaded.;   His rightward shift -- or, by his account, his circling back to conservative values -- began while he was a Yale law student from 1971 to 1974.;   Thomas was admitted while an affirmative action program was in effect, although there is no evidence that he would not have gotten in without it.;   Friend's view; Whatever the reasons -- and his classmates and faculty members at Yale are unable to pinpoint any particular turning points or pivotal events -- Thomas "became more conservative as he went through the process of legal education," said Harry Singleton, a friend.;   By the time Thomas arrived in Jefferson City, Mo., in 1974 to work for John Danforth, now Thomas' chief supporter in the Senate, then the Republican state attorney general, his attitudes were largely formed.;   "His philosophy by that point was that he felt that this country was affording people opportunities if they were willing to work and that to rely on government was in the nature of servitude," said lawyer Harvey Tettlebaum, who worked with Thomas.;   Several years later he captured the attention of the Reagan transition team, which offered a civil rights job to a reluctant Thomas. His friends urged him not to shun a rare opportunity to make policy, and he accepted successive jobs as assistant secretary of education for civil rights and chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.; A colorblind Constitution; In those jobs, Thomas began questioning preferences in jobs and education for racial minorities who had historically suffered discrimination. Later, he began openly opposing such preferences, denouncing the Supreme Court decisions that upheld them and calling for a colorblind Constitution.;   Some critics cynically attribute his ideological metamorphosis to opportunism.;   Thomas, who has declined to be interviewed since his Supreme Court nomination, has not responded. But he has offered an explanation for his political change of heart. In handwritten notes from his files, he recalled telling his Democratic grandparents why he had turned Republican.;   "You all made me become Republican," he told his incredulous grandparents. "Remember . . . when you told me that it wasn't right to beg as long as I could work and get it myself? . . . Remember when you told me that if I ever amounted to anything it would be by the sweat of MY brow and MY elbow grease?;   "And remember when you said you would rather starve than have anyone give you something -- as long as you could work for it? . . . Politically, I had no choice: The only party openly standing for those values was the Republican Party."
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