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Editor's Note: Clarence Thomas worked hard at Yale Law School but his grades were not among the best in his class. He often complained that faculty and white law students had low expectations for his abilities and therefore he kept to himself and seldom spoke in class, a practice he has continued while on the Supreme Court. At Yale, Thomas also found time for intramural football and for regular visits to the local pornography theater.
TWO YEARS BEFORE Clarence Thomas came to Yale, me law school abandoned traditional letter grades and formal class rankings for a modified pass-fail system that allowed students to earn one of four marks: honors, pass, low pass, and fail. The laid-back grading mechanism was just one sign of the intellectual assurance and academic freedom diat permeated Yale. The students were assumed to be the nation's best and brightest - and they did not need grades or formal class rankings to prove it. Yet, if Yale was a comfortable place for those who knew they were top students, it was daunting for those like Thomas who were unsure of where tiiey stood. Certainly, Thomas had done very well at Holy Cross, but Yale was a new, more difficult world. And for him, being black only made that world harder to negotiate.
"You had to prove yourself every day because the presumption was that you were dumb and didn't deserve to be there on merit," Thomas told an interviewer during a meeting of black conservatives in 1980. "Every time you walked into a law class at Yale, it was like having a monkey jump down on your back from the Gothic arches."
Thomas set out to conquer Yale in much the same way he had engaged every other academic challenge he ever faced: by outworking everyone else. He and his wife Kathy took a tiny apartment off campus, but Thomas spent precious little time there. Usually he arrived on campus in time to meet other students for breakfast at 7 a.m. After that, it was on to class and then to study, often in a carrel on the library's third floor. Thomas also worked part time at the New Haven Legal Assistance Association, screening poor people seeking free legal services. Many days,...