Smithsonian ignores Clarence Thomas, promotes Anita Hill

Black Republicans Need Not Apply

(The Daily Caller)  -  Justice Clarence Thomas, the second black man to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court, is practically absent from the new National Museum of African American History and Culture.

Anita Hill, the woman who accused Thomas of sexual harassment, however, is given prominent billing in the museum.

The new Smithsonian, which opened in September, gives Hill pride of place in an exhibit on blacks in the 1990s. The exhibit features testimonies trumpeting her courage and the surge of women’s activism that ensued, while making only peripheral reference to the nation’s second black Supreme Court justice.

There is no showcase of Thomas’s own life and career, which ran its own harsh gauntlet of racial discrimination.

“I am not surprised that Justice Thomas’ inspiring life story is not a part of the new museum,” Mark Paoletta, an assistant White House Counsel in the George H. W. Bush administration who worked on the Thomas confirmation, told The Daily Caller News Foundation. “Civil rights leaders have tried for decades to malign Justice Thomas because he actually dares to have his own views on race issues. One prominent liberal Supreme Court practitioner has called Justice Thomas ‘our greatest Justice,’ but you would never know that listening to the civil rights leadership.”

The exclusion is especially odd given Thomas’ intimate experience with racial discrimination.

Thomas was born in Georgia’s coastal lowlands among impoverished Gullah-speakers. By his own account, he did not master the Queen’s English until his early 20s. He came of age in Jim Crow Savannah, where he was in turn ridiculed by white neighbors and classmates for his unpolished style, one of many indignities typical of his adolescence in the racist south. The startling racial injustices of his youth, by discipline and sheer force of will, gave way to the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass. and Yale Law School.

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