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.
What did Clarence Thomas do before he was nominated for the Supreme Court?
Thomas served as assistant secretary in the U.S. Department of Education (1981–82), chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC; 1982–90), and judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal District in Washington, D.C. (1990–91), a post to which he was appointed by Bush.