That the members of the U.S. Supreme Court are unequally fit to be the subjects of feature-length documentaries is a fact that few could deny. Whereas Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s life and times were more than sufficient to fill 2018’s hagiographic RBG, moviegoers are unlikely to line up to watch Justice Stephen Breyer judging architectural contests or giving lectures on the superiority of international law. Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation saga alone was the stuff of an American epic, but scenes of Chief Justice John Roberts grimly balancing the demands of the Constitution and the New York Times editorial page are unlikely to provoke much interest. In terms of sheer drama, the story of Justice Clarence Thomas is not only the most compelling that the current Supreme Court has to offer but among the most fascinating in all of American public life.
Now, thanks to a first-rate effort from filmmaker Michael Pack, that story has, at last, received the treatment it deserves.
Born in 1948 in the Low Country community of Pin Point, Georgia, the future associate justice famously learned little English until elementary school and once said he didn’t become fully comfortable with the language until the late 1980s. Instead, the young Thomas and his family spoke Gullah, a creole language used primarily by the descendants of slaves in the marshlands of Georgia and South Carolina. When a house fire destroyed the family’s residence in 1954, Thomas moved with his mother and brother to a one-room tenement in still-segregated Savannah. There, the two boys wandered the streets instead of going to school, a state of affairs that changed only when the pair was sent to live with their grandparents in a move that Thomas characterizes as “the longest and most significant journey [he] ever made.”
Emerging from the squalor of the tenement, the children carried all of their possessions in grocery bags. (“Neither bag was full,” Thomas wryly notes.) Yet, once the boys were established in the home of Myers and Christine Anderson, they quickly found a security and order they had never known. Among the details recalled by Thomas are the revelations that he had “never been in a house with a bathtub” and that his grandfather greeted the brothers with the pledge that their “damn vacation [was] over.” A believer in laboring “from sun to sun,” Myers Anderson instilled in his grandchildren a work ethic that would see Thomas through his entire education — from the Catholic grammar school so disciplined “you could hear a gnat tiptoeing across cotton” to high school seminary, Holy Cross, and Yale Law.
Though a number of these details are already known to conservatives, Created Equal brings them stirringly to life with archival footage, period photographs, and overhead shots of the coastal South so beautiful they wouldn’t have been out of place in Cary Fukunaga’s season of True Detective. Similar to last year’s superb Apollo 11, Created Equal eschews an outside narrator and relies instead on editing and the occasional supertitle to propel the plot forward. When voice-over does become necessary, Pack uses excerpts from Thomas’s 2007 memoir, My Grandfather’s Son (read by the author, of course), as well as clips from interviews conducted for the film. All are smoothly arranged, astutely chosen, and highly enlightening.
As Thomas departs Yale and begins the career that would take him from the Missouri attorney general’s office to the highest court in the land, Created Equal’s pacing necessarily increases. Though the film covers Thomas’s work in Jefferson City, in Sen. John Danforth’s office, and at the Department of Education, Pack rightly focuses on his subject’s swiftly evolving ideology. A self-described “lazy libertarian” at Yale, Thomas went to Missouri convinced that all incarcerated African Americans were “political prisoners,” a view he abandoned only when forced to do so by the realities of black-on-black crime. Long repelled by the chaos and contradictions of desegregation busing (“Someone [had] a theory, and then they insert[ed] human beings”), Thomas was swept up in the Reagan Revolution, drawn by the hope that the great man would end “the indiscriminate social engineering of the ’60s and ’70s.”
Perhaps the crucial moment in Thomas’s ideological development came in 1987, when he gave a series of interviews to Juan Williams (then of the Atlantic) and first heard the racially charged taunts of “Uncle Thomas” that would become a regular feature of his professional life. By admitting to Williams that his sister back in Savannah was so “dependent” that “she [got] mad when the mailman [was] late with her welfare check,” Thomas forever marked himself as “the wrong black guy.” From then on, he tells the camera, “there was no going back.” Indeed, when the white journalist Hodding Carter III subsequently characterized Thomas as a “chicken-eating preacher” who “gladly parroted the segregationists’ line,” the civil rights community uttered not one word in objection.
Unsurprisingly, such treatment continued in the aftermath of Thomas’s elevation to the bench, and it is to Pack’s great credit that he refuses to shield our eyes from such attacks. Rather, Created Equal forces our gaze directly onto the nakedly racist political cartoons and sketch-comedy skits with which Thomas was assailed in the years after his confirmation. In one particularly bigoted example, the justice dons a Ku Klux Klan robe in place of his judicial garb. In another, he grins subserviently while shining Justice Antonin Scalia’s shoes. Though such images horrify, Pack was right, and wise, to include them. The Thomas who emerges in this film simply cannot be understood in their absence.
As for the confirmation hearings themselves, suffice it to say that viewers will be startled anew by the similarities between Thomas’s “high-tech lynching” and what awaited Kavanaugh 27 years later. That, and the insufferable smugness of Judicial Committee Chairman Joseph R. Biden, are those scenes’ inevitable takeaways.
Yet, despite a somber second half, Created Equal remains hopeful, even uplifting. Seeing the dirt-poor Savannah boy at the film’s heart and knowing what he would become is a reminder we live in an extraordinary nation. Of that message, Clarence Thomas would certainly approve.
Graham Hillard teaches English and creative writing at Trevecca Nazarene University.
