Justice Clarence Thomas is famously quiet on the Supreme Court. But a new movie, “Created Equal: Clarence Thomas in His Own Words,” is drawn from an exclusive interview with Thomas. Filmmaker Michael Pack shares what he learned about Thomas. Read a lightly edited transcript of the interview, pasted below, or listen on the podcast:
We also cover the following stories:
- President Donald Trump discusses the impeachment proceedings.
- Twenty-one attorneys general call on the Senate to not validate House Democrats’ impeachment push.
- Utah bans conversion therapy for minors.
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Jarrett Stepman: We are now speaking to filmmaker Michael Pack. Pack is the director of the soon-to-be-released documentary “Created Equal: Clarence Thomas in His Own Words.” The movie is set to come out on Jan. 31. Michael, thanks so much for joining us on The Daily Signal.
Michael Pack: Thank you for having me.
Stepman: First off, explain the thread of the documentary. I mean, Clarence Thomas wrote a memoir, “My Grandfather’s Son,” many years ago, but it seems that many Americans don’t know a lot about Clarence Thomas the man. Does the documentary delve into his childhood, his upbringing, his past?
Pack: It does, I mean, exactly. Most Americans don’t know about it. And really the purpose of the film is to tell his whole story and to dispel the myths and fabrications that have grown up over the years.
The format of the film is called “Created Equal: Clarence Thomas in His Own Words” because it’s mainly Justice Thomas speaking directly to camera and telling his story from birth all the way up to today.
It’s based on a three-hour interview that I conducted with Justice Thomas and Ginni, his wife. And only them. There are no other interviews.
He tells his story as he sees it from the very beginning, right to camera. There are recreations, there’s archival footage, there are stills, but there’s no other interview. You hear the story from Justice Thomas because it’s a great story, and in talking to people, he was overwhelmingly the best to tell it. He’s a great storyteller with a wonderful voice.
Stepman: Yeah. That really will be something, especially as Thomas is notably quiet on the Supreme Court. Getting to actually hear this from Thomas himself seems to be one of the most interesting aspects of this documentary.
One thing that really struck me, certainly about Thomas’ life, is his kind of political transformation. Obviously, [he] had rich experiences growing up. [He] grew up in, at the time, [the] still-segregated state of Georgia. Obviously, some harrowing times there.
But he really had a political transformation. He really was, as a young man, a man of the left, I think [he] even supported the Black Panthers and ended up as an appointee of the Reagan administration, obviously, an appointee to the Supreme Court of Republican President George H.W. Bush.
Can you kind of explain that transformation? Because it seems kind of wild on its face.
Pack: Well, that’s right. That’s one of the reasons it’s a great story, because it’s … not only a Horatio Alger story of going from dire poverty and segregation, as you said, to the highest court of land, but of these political, emotional, spiritual changes. And he’s very articulate about it.
As you say, he was born in the South, he was born in Pin Point just outside of Savannah, Gullah Geechee area. So he grew up speaking a dialectic, a Geechee dialect, not even English. They were dirt poor. His mother worked in a crab factory. But they had a lot to eat. It was relatively idyllic.
And then she moved to Savannah where she worked as a maid and took care of Justice Thomas and his brother. But she just couldn’t make ends meet. He was hungry. He was cold in the winter. She’d take him to school, he’d wander the streets. It was really dire poverty of a kind few experience and in the midst of the segregated south.
So then, [when] he was about 8, she brought him to her father, his grandfather, to raise because she realized she couldn’t take care of him. And that is what turned Justice Thomas’ life around. His grandfather who was poor and nearly illiterate, but he had a small home heating oil business.
He gave Thomas and his brother a decent home, discipline, hard work, values. He had converted to Roman Catholicism. He sent them to parochial school, also a segregated school, but run by Irish nuns who gave him more discipline, a great education. And that really turned his life around from the sort of drifting in poverty to this new path.
And he was so successful. He wanted to study to be a priest and he entered seminary and he would’ve been one of the first African American priests in Savannah. But as you implied, or as you said, he became disenchanted with all that.
It was the late ’60s, … he was watching Martin Luther King [Jr.] being shot on TV in ’68 and one of the seminarians said, “I hope that son of a b—- dies,” and that was just too much for Justice Thomas. It was just too much racism there. The church was doing too little about civil rights, and then he flipped and felt, “No, this is all wrong.”
And he lost his vocation. He said he wanted to leave the seminary.
When he told his grandfather, his grandfather kicked him out, the only home he had ever known and he was adrift and he became an angry black man. He saw race and racism explained everything. His grandfather was a sucker, but he was on his own, he had to go wherever he could.
He happened to have a full scholarship at Holy Cross College in Worcester, Massachusetts, a Catholic school. He went up there and there he partook, as you said, in the black radicalism of the ’60s. He helped form the Black Student Union. He engaged in walkouts. As you said, he invited a Black Panther to come speak on the campus. And as Thomas said, they were supporters of everybody who was in your face, Angela Davis, Huey Newton, whomever.
And then a large part of the film is Justice Thomas’ turning away from that, recapturing his faith, coming back to Catholicism, his discovery that all the programs on the left were not working, especially busing in nearby Boston and affirmative action and a lot of the ideas and anti-Americanism of the black radicalism no longer appealed to him.
He sort of started to see through it and drifted to the right until, as you say, he finally went to work for the Reagan administration in the ’80s, and worked first in the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Education, and then the EOC. And then finally he was nominated by George H.W. Bush for the Supreme Court and had that extremely contentious confirmation battle.
But from the time he went to work for Reagan and was a public figure, he was battling people who didn’t agree with him. Civil rights leaders, people on the left, people who said, as he says in the documentary, that he was the wrong kind of black man.
So it culminated in the hearing and that’s a very dramatic story and he tells it in a very moving way. And then he talks about the jurisprudence on the Supreme Court.
So you’re right, it’s a very complex story. It’s hard to understand if you don’t hear it directly from Justice Thomas, which viewers will be able to do.
Stepman: Of course. What made you tell this story of Clarence Thomas now? Does this have anything to do with the recent confirmation battles over Brett Kavanaugh? Did it have to do with some of his tussles with Joe Biden? Why now? Why come forward with the story at this point?
Pack: Well, documentaries take a long time. We’ve been working on it for almost three years, but I have to say, it’s become more relevant.
The Kavanaugh hearing happened in the middle of our production period. The #MeToo movement happened. But I think all that makes it very important to hear a Thomas’ story.
The #MeToo movement likes to say that Anita Hill is its Rosa Parks, founding mother of the movement. But it’s good to look at the real story. I think your podcast is very focused on correcting the myths of history, and that’s a myth.
And the same thing with the Brett Kavanaugh hearing. It was, in a lot of ways, a replay of the Thomas hearing. A lot of people noticed that on both sides. So it’s worth thinking about what it was that was replayed.
I think it’s very current for the time. But I actually think it’s current beyond the time. I think Justice Thomas’ story is a great story, a great American story, and will be 20 or 30 years from now as well as now.
Although I think it’s ripe for the moment, it’s beyond that. I think it’s an inspiring story of overcoming great obstacles, of resilience in the face of many, many challenges. And of somebody who could easily have defined himself as a victim and chose not to.
It’s a great illustration of that path, which is maybe not adequately celebrated today. So I think although it’s of the moment, it’s beyond that.
Stepman: Yeah, absolutely. And to get more [to] the connection to now modern politics, you could say one of the more interesting aspects in the movie is getting into Thomas’ confrontations and his battles in the Senate, especially with now-presidential candidate Joe Biden, who was the chairman, I believe, of the Judiciary Committee at the time.
Today is actually the anniversary, the 47th anniversary, of Roe v. Wade. Obviously, Clarence Thomas has been critical of that decision. That did come up during his hearings. But there’s actually an interesting moment.
I wonder if you could explain where Thomas actually talks about his battles with Biden and some of the debates over natural law jurisprudence in the Constitution. Can you kind of talk about that a little bit?
Pack: Yes. Justice Thomas’ attitudes toward natural law are actually a theme of the film and his sense of how natural law and originalism inform his jurisprudence.
But in the first part of the hearing, Biden asked extremely complex philosophical questions along those lines. But for Justice Thomas, it was that they were a meandering way to get him to say something about Roe and to commit himself. And I think this was the first part of the hearing.
Some people don’t remember that his hearings had two parts. There was a week of very grueling testimony where the Biden inquiry came in. And also they accused him of lots of stuff—smoking marijuana, being an anti-Semite—that he had to answer that was in the press. Plus, very tough grilling.
Then he felt it was over. And these senators had voted split on the committee, but sent his name forward. And then when this full Senate was getting ready to vote, the Anita Hill allegations were leaked. And then it went back to the Senate Judiciary Committee.
So it’s in the first hearing that Joe Biden sort of pressed him on natural law, as Justice Thomas says, as a way to get him to say something about Roe that they could use as a reason not to confirm him. … Since you say, it’s the anniversary of Roe, many, many of the groups opposed to him had that as their explicit reason for doing it. I mean, it was a very political, very concerted effort.
Stepman: Yeah. Again, there seems to be some connection, especially when you talk about the modern Kavanaugh hearings as well, that that issue seems to come up very big and play prominently.
And then, of course, you get the ugliness of the accusations, the sexual assault, and, of course, the media really plays into that as well in creating that storm.
So one question I think I’d like to ask is who is your intended audience of the movie? If you could sit any group of people in this country down and say, “Watch this movie,” who would it be?
Pack: I really made the movie for people who don’t know Justice Thomas and don’t have their minds made up. Those are beyond just your listeners.
I believe it’s convincing to people who don’t know him and have many of these misconceptions: he’s quiet, he doesn’t speak, he’s not smart, he doesn’t have many opinions, he’s not active on the court. And I think you can’t think that after you see this film.
… It’s going to be in movie theaters, as you said, Jan. 31. And the people who are partisans of Justice Thomas and maybe your listeners need to go and show up and buy tickets. The people on the other side are very good at doing that.
Our film is often compared or contrasted to “RBG,” about Ruth Bader Ginsburg. It did fabulously well at the box office. All of her fans … showed up. So the people who might be sympathetic to Thomas have to show up, too.
It’ll be in 15 or so theaters on Jan. 31, and if people show up, it’ll be in many more. They can go to our website, JusticeThomasmovie.com, and see where it’s playing in their area. And if it’s not playing and there’s a big enough group of 30 or 40, we can make a showing in the area that they are [in]. There’s ways to sign up for that on the website.
So the purpose of the film is really to bring Justice Thomas back to the prominence and respect that he deserves. And I don’t think that will happen unless there’s some groundswell out there. So I hope that your show helps create that groundswell.
Stepman: Yeah, we definitely hope so, too.
It’s interesting. There were some controversies at the African American museum here in Washington, D.C., that Clarence Thomas didn’t get enough of a prominent position.
Obviously, you could say, at this point, [he’s] one of the greatest Americans who’s been on the Supreme Court, and has an incredible story. I think that’s inspirational, especially for young Americans who do grow up in bad circumstances.
I mean, few have experienced the kind of struggles that he did as a young man and yet rose to this position and became not just a man who succeeded but is such a learned man and understanding of the law, really one of the most prominent positions in American life.
It seems that a lot of young Americans, in particular, can learn from that story and create an inspiration that they can empower themselves rather than feeling like victims.
Pack: Absolutely. That is really true. And we hope that beyond its time in theaters and on TV, or wherever it goes, that we’ll be able to get excerpts from it and curriculum materials into schools [for] Black History Month. There’s a lot of counter narratives to that.
The 1619 Project has curriculum materials and Black Lives Matter and there’s [the] reparations movement. And we hope that our film, or parts of our film, with curriculum materials can be incorporated into every high school across America because I think it is inspiring to young people, especially African Americans, but not only. And I think it’s a counter narrative to the sort of victimhood that many put forward. I mean, it’s another way of living your life that Justice Thomas illustrates, and I think it is very inspiring.
Stepman: Yeah, that’s great. That’s definitely maybe a pro-1776, a man who’s actually experienced racism and terrible things in this country yet embraces the principles that made America great to begin with. Truly inspiring story, as you said, very much counters the opinions of some at the 1619 Project that directly counters and says that are founding ideals are wrong. So absolutely an inspirational story.
Michael, thank you so much for joining us. The name of the movie is “Created Equal: Clarence Thomas in His Own Words.” It’s out Jan. 31 and it’s definitely going to be a must-see. Thank you so much, Michael, for joining us.
Pack: Thank you. And go to that website, JusticeThomasmovie.com.
Stepman: Thank you very much.