Clarence Thomas: The Justice Nobody Knows

Supreme Court Justice Gives First Television Interview To 60 Minutes' Steve Kroft

(CBS)  When he was six, the house in Pinpoint burned down and his mother moved Thomas and his brother to a tenement in Savannah, trading rural poverty for urban squalor.

"It was raw sewage in the backyard. It was cold in the winter. I mean it was one of the most miserable times of my early life," Thomas remembers of living in the tenements.

But his circumstances and his life were about to change. His mother, who was making $10 a week as a maid, couldn't make ends' meet and decided to send Clarence and his brother off to live with her father.

"My mother packed our bags, told us we were to our grandparents' house a few blocks away," he remembers.

When he got to the front door he was met by his grandfather, Myers Anderson, a barely literate but frugal and industrious man who owned a truck and eked out a modest existence delivering fuel oil and firewood. He was a towering presence, who still looms over Thomas's life.

"Do you remember the first things your grandfather said to you?" Kroft asks.

"He said the damn vacation is over," Thomas recalls. "And he meant it. And there would be rules and regulations."

"Some of the rules were that my grandmother was always right. That meant him too," Thomas remembers. "And he would say, 'Old Man Can't is dead. I helped bury him.' I can't tell you how many times I've heard that. He felt very, very strongly that nothing was impossible."

Thomas says his grandfather was the greatest man he ever met, and in tribute named his memoir "My Grandfather's Son." But he didn't necessarily think so when he was growing up. His life was consumed by endless chores and regular duty on his grandfather's delivery truck. Summer vacations were spent working a plot of land that had been deeded to his ancestors after the Civil War, just across the road from the plantation where they had worked as slaves. He and his brother helped build a house, cleared land, picked crops and learned under his grandfather's tutelage that blisters turn to calluses and plantings into harvests.

"So you guys were field hands," Kroft remarks.

"Yeah, if you wanna be pleasant about it, you can call us field hands. But we were his laborers. I got up the nerve and said, 'Daddy, you know, slavery's over.' And he, 'Not in my damn house,'" Thomas remembers with a chuckle.

"You knew he loved you," Kroft says.

"I knew he cared about us enough to provide for us, to give us discipline, to spend time with us. We were under his wings from the beginning of the day to the end of the day," Thomas says.

And one of the things they learned there about was race. His grandfather was an active member of the NAACP, who bailed out civil rights protesters in the 1960's, but was realistic about the world they lived in.

"Did your grandfather ever give you any advice in terms how to handle yourself with the police or with white people?" Kroft asks.

"That was constant as we got older particularly, as we entered puberty it was constant and I remember the day he said, 'Boy, you up in age now. Don't you ever look a white woman in the eye.' That was the kind of thing you heard," Thomas remembers.

Did he explain why?

"Oh, yeah. Because the point was that you could be accused of anything," Thomas explains.