Divisions in the Civil Rights Community

Abstract

Associate Justice Thurgood Marshall was the first African American to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court. He helped produce and was also a product of the 20th-century civil rights movement. President George Bush nominated Clarence Thomas to succeed him, a man who had made his professional career in a rapid succession of civil rights appointments in the same Republican administrations that were attempting to reconstruct the policies that Marshall and his successors in national civil rights organizations had created and interpreted.That Bush nominated Thomas, whose policy positions were so opposed to civil rights law as it had been legislated and implemented, did not prevent these organizations from being riven by disagreement over Thomas's fitness. When Anita Hill's allegations of sexual harassment became public, these organizations' opinions of the Thomas nomination became even more problematic.The nomination of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court offers an opportunity to observe the influence and effectiveness of the civil rights lobby on an important policy question.