The Left spent years calling him corrupt, bought, and illegitimate.
And last week, the man they cannot destroy stood on a stage at the Hoover Institution and cried.
But what Clarence Thomas said is something the socialist Democrats and their media allies will never touch – because it destroys everything they want you to believe about Justice Thomas.
The Man Who Made Him
Myers Anderson had nine months of formal education.
His wife, Christine, made it to the sixth grade.
Neither one ever set foot in a high school.
And yet the two of them – a man raised by a freed slave, a woman with a sixth-grade education in the segregated South – built something the American left has spent 35 years trying to tear down.
They built Clarence Thomas.
Thomas grew up in Pin Point, Georgia, in a one-room shack with dirt floors and no plumbing.
His father walked out when he was two years old.
His mother earned ten dollars a week as a maid.
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When a house fire took what little they had, she eventually sent her sons to live two and a half blocks away – to their grandparents.
That two-and-a-half-block walk changed everything.
Myers Anderson ran a fuel-oil delivery business.
He was strict, disciplined, and completely intolerant of excuses.
Thomas said his grandfather had a favorite response when young Clarence complained he couldn't do something.
"Old man can't is dead," Myers Anderson told him. "I helped bury him."
And old man can't was buried many times in that house – building into the boy who would become America's second-longest-serving Supreme Court Justice the one thing no government program can manufacture: the belief that complaining is a waste of time, and that what you do with what you have is the only thing that matters.
"My grandfather, no education, raised by a freed slave, and he never complained," Thomas said on stage, his voice breaking. "He did it. He was just a great man. Now what do you do? How do you complain when he had nothing, no education? What do you say to it? But he sets this example of how you live your life."
The room went silent.
The Promise
Both grandparents died suddenly in 1983.
Myers Anderson died on March 30.
Christine died on May 1.
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Strokes took them both, five weeks apart.
Clarence Thomas was 34 years old, a rising figure in the Reagan administration, and suddenly without the two people who had anchored his entire life.
He made a decision.
"When both my grandparents died suddenly in 1983," Thomas told Hoover Institution fellow Peter Robinson, "the decision I made was to live the rest of my life as a memorial to theirs."
He paused to collect himself.
The conversation stopped.
And in that silence, you could see exactly what the Left has never understood about this man.
Thomas drew a straight line from his grandfather's example to the intellectual framework he later found in economist Thomas Sowell – specifically Sowell's 1975 book Race and Economics, which Thomas said gave him permission to think differently from other Black leaders.
Sowell argued that the groups who prospered in America – Japanese Americans after internment, Jewish immigrants who arrived with nothing – did so through attitudes of self-reliance that valued hard work over grievance.
Thomas recognized it immediately.
"Where did I first hear that?" Thomas asked on stage. "I heard it from my grandfather, the single greatest man I've ever known."
His grandfather had been living Sowell's thesis in Savannah, Georgia, decades before Sowell wrote a word.
What Democrats Cannot Forgive
The attacks on Clarence Thomas have run for 35 years without interruption.
During his 1991 confirmation hearings, Joe Biden presided over what Thomas himself called "a high-tech lynching for uppity Blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves."
The years that followed brought magazine covers depicting Thomas shining on Antonin Scalia's shoes.
Democrat attorneys general compared him to a house slave.
MSNBC spent years targeting him with racially offensive attacks.
ProPublica – funded by liberal millionaires – ran coordinated hit pieces claiming he had accepted improper gifts from a friend.
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Senate Democrats threatened to defund Supreme Court security unless Thomas behaved as they demanded.
Not one of these attacks was about law, or ethics, or the Constitution.
Every single one of them was about this: Clarence Thomas grew up in segregated Georgia, descended from slaves, raised by a man with nine months of education – and he refused to be what the left needed him to be.
He refused to see himself as a victim.
He refused to let his race define his politics.
He refused to be owned by the people who claimed to speak for him.
His grandfather's voice was louder than all of them.
"Old man can't is dead. I helped bury him."
The Left has poured 35 years into proving Myers Anderson wrong.
They have failed.
Clarence Thomas sits on the Supreme Court.
He sits there as a promise kept.
Sources:
- Elaine Mallon, "Clarence Thomas chokes up as he reveals promise he made after grandparents' sudden deaths," Fox News, August 19, 2026.
- Amy Curtis, "This Is Why Justice Clarence Thomas Got Emotional at a Recent Public Appearance," Townhall, August 20, 2026.
- "Justice Thomas is one of the most influential jurists our country has ever known," U.S. Senator Mike Lee, Senate.gov, May 2023.
- AEI, "False Leftist Attacks on Justice Thomas Are Part of Pressure Campaign to Undermine Supreme Court," American Enterprise Institute, 2023.
- Jason L. Riley, "The Soul of Black Conservatism," Manhattan Institute, 2021.
- Fox News, "Left, media's racial attacks on Clarence Thomas spark bipartisan rebuke," July 2023.
- Mark Paoletta and Michael Pack, Created Equal: Clarence Thomas in His Own Words, 2022.