Clarence Thomas is an American jurist who serves as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. He was nominated by President George H. W. Bush to succeed Thurgood Marshall and has served since 1991.
After Marshall, Thomas is the second African American to serve on the Court and its longest-serving member since Anthony Kennedy’s retirement in 2018. In 1971, Thomas married Kathy Grace Ambush. The couple had one child, Jamal Adeen (b. 1973, New Haven, Connecticut), Thomas’s sole offspring.
Thomas and his first wife separated in 1981 and divorced in 1984. In 1987, Thomas married Virginia Lamp, a lobbyist and aide to Republican Congressman Dick Armey. In 1997, they took in Thomas’s six-year-old great-nephew, Mark Martin Jr., who had lived with his mother in Savannah public housing. Since 1999, Thomas and his wife have travelled across the U.S. in a motorcoach between Court terms.
Clarence Thomas Education
Raised Catholic, Thomas attended the predominantly black St. Pius X High School for two years before transferring to St. John Vianney’s Minor Seminary on the Isle of Hope, where he was among a few black students.
He also briefly attended Conception Seminary College, a Roman Catholic seminary in Missouri. No one in Thomas’s family had attended college. Thomas has said that he left the seminary in the aftermath of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.
Clarence Thomas Age
74 years
Clarence Thomas Party
Republican
Clarence Thomas Office
Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States since 1991.
Clarence Thomas Books
My Grandfather’s Son, Clarence Thomas–confronting the Future: Selections from the Senate Confirmation Hearings and Prior Speeches