CLARENCE THOMAS' TRIAL BY FIRE FROM A CRUCIBLE OF POVERTY, A CONSERVATIVE IS FORMED
There, in the segregated black Georgia of four decades past, began the toughening of Clarence Thomas, nominee to the United States Supreme Court.; Abandoned by his father, driven by his hard-eyed grandfather and a band of nuns sent south to teach black children, young Clarence learned sharecropping and scholarship, hard labor and the Latin mass, and how to survive the walk home through black Savannah in his Catholic school uniform.;    From these roots, he might have become one of any number of bright, activist black men to rise out of Southern poverty and press a politically aggressive liberal agenda of civil rights and affirmative action -- as did men like Thurgood Marshall, the retiring justice whose Supreme Court seat Thomas might take.;    Instead, Thomas, now 43, became something else -- a hybrid product of harsh Southern history and baby-boom ambition, a proponent of personal strength over dependence, of individualism over government activism.;    By the time he arrived in Washington with the Reagan administration, he had developed into a rare breed -- a black conservative so impressive to Republican presidents that he was set on the road to the highest court in the land. But he was so disturbing to traditional liberals that they are eager to deprive him of Senate confirmation in September.;    Historically, trying to predict Supreme Court nominees has been extremely risky. Still, many liberals are convinced that Thomas' past clearly shows his future. He would, they say, oppose abortion rights, school busing plans and affirmative action programs. He would also weaken the wall separating government and religion and further restrict the rights of criminal suspects and defendants.;    Not surprisingly, Thomas' many friends and supporters draw different conclusions. They see him as an independent spirit, a probable centrist on a court that has been steering rightward for several years.;    The Georgia beginning;  But any attempt to understand the potential successor to the revered Thurgood Marshall must begin in Georgia.;    There, just the other day, Leola Williams, Thomas' mother, talked about how the force of family worked on her son:;    "Clarence was surrounded by all our older parents. He saw how our family and other people struggled to make a living.;    "I guess Clarence wanted to prove to himself he could be what he wanted to be -- and prove to his grandfather he could be the kind of person (his grandfather) wanted him to be.";    The grandfather, the late Myers Anderson, began training Thomas in earnest when the boy was 9 and Leola Williams' life suddenly began coming apart. Her house off Pin Point Avenue had gone up in smoke, and some months later, her husband went north to Philadelphia, leaving her with two young children and a third on the way.; Williams took her daughter, Emma Mae, and moved in with an aunt while she awaited the birth of her second son, Myers. Clarence went to live with his grandparents in Savannah, to help with Anderson's year-round oil and ice delivery business.;    His grandfather proved to be a profound force in Thomas' life -- a mentor, a role model, an unrelenting taskmaster and the embodiment of a personal philosophy that Thomas once recalled this way:; "He used to tell me that there was no problem that elbow grease couldn't solve. Then he'd say, 'Old Man Can't is dead. I helped bury him.' ";    When Anderson wasn't coaching Thomas, in his farm fields or on his delivery truck, he made sure the lessons continued, in the hands of the Franciscan nuns of all-black St. Benedict the Moor School.;    Thomas, who had experienced racial mistreatment by white seminarians in Georgia, ultimately rejected seminary life. He has identified an episode at Immaculate Conception Seminary in Conception, Mo., in 1968 as the final humiliation. He said he heard a seminarian there react to the shooting of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. by saying, "Good, I hope the son of a bitch dies.";    Thomas left the seminary and went north to enroll at Holy Cross College in the gritty New England factory city of Worcester, Mass.;    A Southerner in New England;  The Southern farm boy was forced to endure not only the harsh winters of New England, but also the chilly atmosphere of a white college just beginning to widen opportunities for blacks.;    Within days of King's assassination, the school created a scholarship fund named after the civil-rights leader and stepped up the recruiting of blacks. And so Thomas, who was driven from the Missouri seminary by racism, became one of the beneficiaries of an effort to combat it.;    Thomas, who paid for his college education with loans, jobs and the newly raised scholarship funds, soon was drawn into the turbulence of Vietnam War and "black power" politics.;    He helped found a Black Student Union, writing and typing its constitution. In December 1969, he and other black students resigned to protest the suspensions of black students who had blocked a General Electric recruiter on campus. Stung, school officials granted a blanket amnesty and the students returned.;    Thomas went on to run track and write for the campus newspaper. He graduated from Holy Cross with honors and left for Yale University Law School in New Haven, Conn.; Freewheeling liberalism;  "He came into law school espousing liberal views from his freewheeling, unattached undergraduate days," said Harry Singleton, a black classmate, close friend and a former civil rights official in the Reagan Education Department.;    "But he became more conservative as he went through the process of legal education.";    Yale law students, Singleton explained, were exposed to conservative law professors with powerful minds.;    "I used to discuss conservative ideas with Clarence and he was interested in them," Singleton said. "They were about the dangers of big government trying to solve all the ills of society and how every time you do that you take away from the liberties of the people.";    But it was Thomas Sowell, the conservative black economist now at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, whose work came to grip Thomas' mind.;    Shortly after his arrival at Yale, Thomas remembered when someone gave him one of Sowell's books and "I threw it in the trash" because "it really went against all the things we'd been indoctrinated to believe about the radical movement and the peace movement.";    But after law school, Thomas rediscovered one of Sowell's books. Sowell's provocative 1983 work, "The Economics and Politics of Race," was "manna from heaven," Thomas said.;    In that book, Sowell, arguing from a laissez-faire perspective, endorsed the notion that blacks would benefit more from pursuing economic achievement than political agitation.;    From Yale to Washington;  Thomas, always a top student, was recruited out of Yale in 1974 by John Danforth, R-Mo., then Missouri attorney general, a Yale trustee and a frequent campus visitor. Danforth brought Thomas to Jefferson City, Mo., to work in the attorney general's office.;    When Danforth became a U.S. senator in 1977, Thomas stayed in St. Louis to work as an assistant counsel for the Monsanto Corp., then in 1979 joined Danforth in Washington as a legislative aide.; Reagan administration officials were so impressed by Thomas and his new conservative leanings that they appointed him assistant secretary for civil rights in the Department of Education. In 1982, they promoted him to the more visible post of chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. There controversy dogged him for the next eight years.;    Congress learned in 1989 that the EEOC under Thomas' direction had permitted more than 13,000 age discrimination claims to lapse.;    Civil-rights groups accused Thomas of failing to enforce other anti-discrimination laws as well, and of retaliating against employees who disagreed with his policies.;    Thomas concentrated on winning relief for victims of actual discrimination. He steered away from lawsuits based on statistical evidence and remedies that included timetables for future hiring.;    But he was unwilling to go along with more strident voices in the Reagan administration who opposed most legal remedies for discrimination, so he often felt isolated from both the administration and the civil rights establishment.;    Several years ago, a top Reagan domestic adviser who wanted his coffee cup refilled at a black-tie dinner looked up and spotted a black man in a tuxedo hovering near the table. Holding the cup aloft, the official asked for more coffee. The black man reached past the cup to shake hands and said evenly: "Perhaps we haven't met. I'm Clarence Thomas.";
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