Clarence Thomas: The Justice Nobody Knows

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

(CBS)  Thomas grew up in the Jim Crow South, using colored bathrooms and attending all-black schools, spending what little free time he had at the Carnegie Library. It was the only library blacks were allowed to use.

"This was the haven. It was a sort of anecdote to the limitations that you had in Savannah," Thomas says. "It was a way out. It was a way to expand myself. It was a way to become better. I can't tell you how many of the people who labored in kitchens, people who worked, did the backbreaking chores, the people who didn't have education who looked me in the eye and said, 'Boy, get your education. Because if you get it in here, nobody can take it away from you.'"

His grandfather, who was Catholic, agreed and saved enough to send him to a parochial school. The white nuns told him all God's children were equal, the only difference the pigment of their skin. Thomas still believes it and the church had a profound influence on his life.

Thomas says he was going to be a priest. "I went into the seminary when I was 16," he recalls.

His grandfather's reaction?

"He made it very clear this was gonna be a huge financial burden but they would find a way as he said. His only requirement was that I not, he said, 'You can't quit.' And then he looked at me in the face, 'Boy, don't you shame me and don't you shame your race.'"

"He knew that you were going into the white world," Kroft remarks.

"Yeah," Thomas agrees. "Because we had this enduring kind of vision or hope that, if given a chance, we could do as well as anybody. All we had to do is be given a chance."

But by 1968 Thomas had doubts about the priesthood. He had read the books of James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison and Richard Wright and began to question the church's commitment to civil rights.

"The nail in the coffin of my vocation was in the spring of 1968 when Dr. King was assassinated. I was going back into the dorm, to my dormitory and someone said in front of me when we heard that Dr. King had been assassinated. He said, 'Well, that's good. That's, I hope the SOB dies.' And that was it. That was the end of seminary. That was the end of the vocation. That was the end of for all practical purposes my Catholic faith," Thomas remembers.

Thomas remembers breaking the news to his grandfather. "I had to go back home. That's the hard part. And tell him. You know, I had made my promise I wouldn't quit. So, I told him. And he immediately kicked me out of the house."

"That's pretty harsh," Kroft remarks.

"Harsh is too strong a word. That wasn’t him. He was a hard man, you know? He said to me, 'You let me down and, you know, you're on your own,'" Thomas remembers.

Asked if he felt guilty, or if he was angry at his grandfather, Thomas tells Kroft, "I think I was angry at everybody. I was angry at the church because the church wasn’t aggressively pointing out how immoral racism was. I was upset with my grandfather because he didn’t understand what I was going through. I was upset with the country because of the bigotry. I was upset at the submissiveness of blacks in putting up with bigotry. This was the era when you had the Black Power Movement and that was enticing, it was liberating. And you sort of get swept up in that."

He'd always been an honors student and won a scholarship to Holy Cross, where he dressed in Army fatigues and combat boots and founded the black students union. He also graduated near the top of his class, and was accepted to Yale Law School, where he studied alongside future cabinet member Robert Reich, future U.N. Ambassador John Bolton, and future Supreme Court colleague Samuel Alito.

"I mean, you were in some pretty exclusive company," Kroft says.

"Maybe they were in exclusive company," Thomas replies, laughing.

Bill and Hillary Clinton were also there at the time. "Yeah, but they weren't president," Thomas says, laughing. "Maybe they were running for president, but they weren't president then."

"And you weren't Supreme Court justice," Kroft points out.

"No, you didn’t know any of that," Thomas says.