Indeed, Newsweek noted that "'Thomas is an intense opponent of affirmative action, yet has benefited from it throughout his life... the very reason he was named to succeed Thurgood Marshall on the Supreme Court is because of his race."
At the same time, Thomas's confirmation left in its wake a number of simmering conflicts: Many women felt Hill's charges weren't taken seriously enough by an all-male Senate panel, advocates of abortion rights and affirmative action feared that Thomas would be a hostile voice on the increasingly conservative Court, and many blacks felt they had been subject at once to tokenism and racist manipulation. For a figure whose "humble beginnings" were a high-profile calling card among his Washington sponsors, Thomas had already made an impression that was anything but humble.
Thomas was born on June 23, 1948 in Pin Point, Georgia, a tiny coastal hamlet named for the plantation that once stood there. His mother Leola was 18 at the time of his birth; his father M. C. Thomas left the family two years later. Leola, her two children--Clarence and his older sister Emma Mae--and her Aunt Annie Graham occupied what Newsweek described as "'a one-room wooden house near the marshes.
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