So by the time Hill came forward, I had already had a primer into a debate that had been happening among Black people since slavery. Reflecting on the impact of the hearings, Toni Morrison would later write, “In matters of race and gender, it is now possible and necessary, as it seemed never to have been before, to speak about these matters without the barriers, the silences, the embarrassing gaps in discourse.”
Before Thomas’s nomination, Thurgood Marshall was the only African American to be appointed to the Supreme Court. When Marshall announced his plan to retire in June 1991, President George H. W. Bush saw it as an opportunity to increase his support among two disparate, and increasingly dispirited, political blocs: the anti-abortion, anti-affirmative-action white American base of his own Republican Party; and right-leaning, Reagan-voting African Americans. In Clarence Thomas, a forty-three-year-old African American Republican from Pinpoint, Georgia, with only two years of experience as a federal judge, Bush found the ideal candidate to help him appeal to both these constituencies.
The dissent was immediate. The NAACP, the AFL-CIO, and the National Organization for Women (NOW) released statements vowing to fight Thomas’s nomination. NOW was concerned with his stance on abortion; the AFL-CIO opposed his conservative positions. But it was the board of directors of the NAACP, the nation’s largest racial justice organization, whose position stands out in a 49–1 vote. “While we appreciate the fact that Judge Thomas came up in the school of hard knocks and pulled himself up by his own bootstraps,” NAACP chairman William F. Gibson said in a press conference, “our concern is for the millions of blacks who have no access to bootstraps, theirs or others.”
Despite this stance, Thomas polled well among African American voters. And more important for Republicans, his nomination initially found little resistance during the Senate Judiciary Committee’s confirmation hearings that September. After a few days of testimony, the committee, chaired by Senator Joe Biden (D-Del.), split its vote, moving the process to the Senate floor without a clear majority in Thomas’s favor. After learning of Hill’s allegations in late August, a small group of Democratic senators led by Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) urged Biden to take up Hill’s case. After weeks of going back and forth with Democratic staffers and senators over how best to protect her privacy, Hill held a press conference on October 7, 1991, and said she was willing to testify.
In those few days leading up to her appearance, we learned a few facts about her. Like Thomas, she was born into a family of Southern farmers, had graduated from Yale Law School, and was a registered Republican. At the time, Republicans erased many of the same aspects of Hill’s biography that they extolled as virtues in Thomas’s. Framing Thomas as a rural, working-class African American who worked his way into the upper echelon of academia and the federal government, they used his life story to discredit Hill, eventually leading to a wide-scale character assault on her. Arlen Specter (R-Penn.) accused Hill of “flat-out perjury.” Republicans drew on centuries of sexist images of women as delusional, and racist ideas of Black women as hypersexual. Conservative John Doggett, a Texas businessman and lawyer, testified that Hill was an erotomaniac who fantasized about dating him.
In response, Hill revealed in great detail the extent of Thomas’s harassment. “He talked about pornographic materials depicting individuals with large penises or large breasts, involved in various sex acts,” she quietly recounted to the all-white, all-male Senate panel. “On several occasions, Thomas told me graphically of his own sexual prowess.”
In trying to refute Hill’s claims before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Thomas called the hearing “a high-tech lynching for uppity Blacks.” He conjured up one of the most violent acts of America’s racial history to shore up his support among white liberals and conservatives alike. Not only was he successful, he also introduced a new racial and gendered trope that was well known among African Americans but less familiar to white Americans: the Black woman as race traitor. “Having made Anita Hill into a villain, he proceeded—wittingly or not—to erase her and return to a simpler and more conventional cast,” historian Nell Irvin Painter wrote.
By the end of his story Anita Hill had lost the only role, that of villain, that his use of stereotype had allowed her. She finally disappeared, as he spun out a drama pitting the lone and persecuted figure of Clarence Thomas, the black man, against an army of powerful white assailants. Democratic senators became the lynch mob; Thomas became the innocent lynch victim. As symbol and as actual person, Anita Hill was no longer to be found.
By the mid-twentieth century, the horror of lynching was transformed from a material reality to a political metaphor, one that Thomas not only used to his advantage but also canonized on the national stage. When R. Kelly, Bill Cosby, and Justin Fairfax, the lieutenant governor of Virginia, fended off charges from Black women (and in the case of Cosby, white women, from over several decades as well) who accused them of rape, they compared themselves to lynching victims. It is only now, in this age of #MeToo, that such analogies have started to ring hollow.
In the 1990s, however, the battles were much more internecine. “A conversation, a serious one among black men and women, has begun in a new arena, and the contestants defy the mold,” reflected Morrison.
By the end of the hearings, African American support for Thomas was the highest it had been, with 70 percent of African Americans backing his nomination and 50 percent of whites, according to an ABC News–Washington Post poll that was conducted the weekend after the hearings closed. The result was that Democrats and Republicans, emboldened by the public response, voted 52–48 to confirm Clarence Thomas as a justice of the Supreme Court.
The morning that the vote was announced, I was late for school. The radio in my family’s car, a used beige Jaguar, whose blaring muffler always made me shrink a little out of embarrassment as we climbed the driveway of my school, was turned on. When we reached the front steps, Michael Stipe, the front man for R.E.M., wailed, “It’s the End of the World as We Know It,” making me pause as I refastened my jacket and looked in the mirror to smooth my hair. Even then, I knew the song was a premonition.
What I didn’t know was that a year later, I’d experience this same scene of emotional shock and sartorial realignment as I walked to my dorm room, the morning after a well-respected African American man, three years my senior, sexually assaulted me. The Hill hearings had betrayed a simple and tragic truth: if I were to come forward against this upwardly mobile, Ivy League–educated Black man, most Black people would not believe me.
But I believed Hill. And Hill’s words did change the world, bit by bit and for the better. Sexual harassment cases more than doubled, according to Equal Employment Opportunity Commission filings, from 6,127 in 1991 to 15,342 in 1996. During that period, awards to victims under federal laws nearly quadrupled, from $7.7 million to $27.8 million. 1992 was dubbed the “Year of the Woman” in politics because more women ran and won their elections. Five women became U.S. senators, including Carol Moseley Braun, the first African American woman ever elected, and twenty-four women won new seats in the House of Representatives.