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 is Clarence Thomas known for?
Clarence Thomas is known as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States since 1991, the second African American to serve on the court.
He became a legislative assistant to Senator John Danforth in 1979 and was made Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Education in 1981. President Ronald Reagan appointed Thomas as Chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) the next year. President George H. W.