"The problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color line" wrote W.E.B. Dubois over 100 years ago. That problem and one man's dramatic confrontation with it at the end of that century is met head on in My Grandfather's Son. Justice Thomas's apologia sua vita is a masterpiece of American autobiography. Its spare lucid prose, easily accessible to the lay reader, makes it akin to that of President Ulysses S. Grant's memoirs.


This is not a legal book. Those searching for case analysis or deep judicial philosophy must look elsewhere. Instead it is an intense meditation on one man's life, his attempt and failures in adhering to the virtues he was taught when young, and the cost of that effort. I met Justice Thomas long before he was a Judge, when he was, in Anita Hill’s words "a rising star." I have seen him speak a number of times since then. Nonetheless, this memoir more than his appearance or accent, gives a full picture of how Southern he is and how recently much of America left a world of horse drawn agriculture, outdoor plumbing and stark, State-enforced segregation. Clarence Thomas is not old enough to collect Social Security but lived all of these things.


My Grandfather's Son refers to his grandfather, Myers Anderson, who he called "Daddy" because his own father left him shortly after he was born. This tireless small businessman and workman by example and discipline raised Justice Thomas and his brother. Through constant labor, early morning wake-ups and strict discipline, what we would now call "tough love", his grandparents shaped Clarence Thomas into a man who could swim against the tide. Sacrifice is a hallmark of this book: the sacrifice of his mother in sending him and his brother away when she could not care for them; the sacrifice of his grandparents to send him to Catholic School so that he could have a better education than provided by Georgia.


There are apologies but no excuses. The Justice recounts his failures, in seminary and in marriage, unflinchingly, if somewhat obliquely in this Facebook era. All of Clarence Thomas's life is here. Pinpoint, Georgia where he and his relatives still spoke Gullah, the ancient patois of escaped slaves of the Georgia coastal islands. Mid-century Savannah, with slums and segregation. Rural Georgia where men still tilled the land with horses as in the Founders time. Pre-Vatican II Catholic Schools where the Baltimore Catechism was taught and the faculty wore habits. That Catechism which begins - "Who made me?" "God made me." "Why did he make me?" "To know, love and to serve him." - echoes through the story of the Justice's life. The turbulent 60's in New England including Holy Cross, College and less auspiciously, New Haven's Yale. A stint in Missouri with future Senator Jack Danforth, again transforms Thomas's life. Senator Danforth lives up to his nickname "St. Jack" in Thomas's telling.


Just as mutable as the times and the locations are the author's political views. Never a liberal, he was radical. Attracted to Black Power and later, some aspects of the Nation of Islam, he nonetheless went to work for a Republican. His experience with liberal Democrats seemed to push him further and further Right.


After a decade at the EEOC, he is appointed to the D.C. Court of Appeals or as we call it in Washington "the Supreme Court's Waiting Room." Upon Thurgood Marshall's retirement he is tapped for the High Court. It is at this point that the Left is going to hate this book. Clarence Thomas clearly and unequivocally describes the racism and the mendacity with which the liberal elite approached destroying him. It is devastating. It is especially destructive to the Left's image of itself.


The law professors, civil rights industry and Democratic Senators who make a living decrying "hate" and "racism" and "rushing to judgment" are here revealed in all of their fetid, hypocritical glory. It is like a novel by Tom Wolfe but it is all true and not a bit funny. Justice Thomas issues a powerful J' accuse and in My Grandfather's Son he is both Dreyfus and Zola. He evokes Native Son, The Invisible Man and Too Kill a Mockingbird, to relate and devastate not only Anita Hill's false charges, but the eagerness of a certain kind of white liberal to believe and encourage them. Thomas is clear that it is only a certain kind of liberal that stoops to using racial appeals they would decry in any circumstance except pillorying a black conservative. Justice Ginsberg, Juan Williams, Justice Souter, Vernon Jordan, and Thurgood Marshall himself all acquit themselves well. Justice Thomas's wife Virginia and the rest of his family also prop him up in very dark times. But it is the example of his Grandfather that gives him the strength to put one foot in front of the other. The 'Grandfather clauses' used in the Reconstruction South to disenfranchise freedmen, are here turned on their head as Thomas's Grandfather provides the power to oppose those who would still a black man's voice 100 years later.


Finally, Justice Thomas pens a kind of Pilgrim's Progress in which he sets out on a journey that relates horrible trials but ends back in the hand of the Lord. There is nothing like it from any Supreme Court Justice, but then again none of them is Clarence Thomas.