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What I Saw at the Daytona 500<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n Nicole Stelle Garnett*<\/a><\/p>\n <\/p>\n I had the incredible good fortune of serving as Justice Clarence Thomas\u2019s law clerk during the Supreme Court\u2019s October 1998 term. It was the most formative year of my life.\u00a0 My memories of the year\u2014a year of learning lessons about life and the law, personal integrity and fortitude, formula racing and recreational vehicles (seriously)\u2014remain a vivid mosaic seared forever in my heart and mind.\u00a0 I could not possibly do them justice in a short essay, so I offer instead a reflection on four memories here.\u00a0 These memories are icons of the wisdom and goodness that the Justice shared with my co-clerks and me during the one amazing, unforgettable year that we spent learning from Justice Thomas.\u00a0 I have previously reflected on Justice Thomas as a jurist,[1]<\/sup><\/a> but this tribute to him on the anniversary of his service on the Supreme Court reflects on him as a person.<\/p>\n The first icon comes from my second week on the job.\u00a0 On Tuesday, July 28, 1998, Justice Thomas delivered the keynote address at the National Bar Association\u2019s annual convention.\u00a0 The National Bar Association was established in 1924 as the \u201cNegro Bar Association\u201d because black attorneys, at the time, were routinely denied admission to the American Bar Association.\u00a0 The National Bar Association, which today has a membership of over 65,000, remains an important professional organization for many Black lawyers.\u00a0 In 1998, just seven years after he was confirmed, Justice Thomas was\u2014to put it mildly\u2014a controversial figure, particularly among black lawyers.\u00a0 To be sure, he remains so in some circles, but the level of animosity and degree of controversy has faded (thankfully) over his thirty years of service on the Court.\u00a0 Early on, the very fact that he was invited to speak frequently generated bitter rancor.\u00a0 The National Bar Association\u2019s invitation was, sadly, no exception.\u00a0 The organization had invited, disinvited, and reinvited him to deliver the address in the months leading up to the event.\u00a0 And a prominent federal judge active in the organization was threatening to lead a walk out\/counter-event if the Justice accepted the re-invitation, which is exactly what he courageously and magnanimously chose to do.<\/p>\n On the day of the speech, I had met Justice Thomas in person only twice.\u00a0 The first time was during my interview in chambers; the second time was at his 50th<\/sup> Birthday party, hosted by a former law clerk soon after I was hired.[2]<\/sup><\/a>\u00a0 Although I barely knew him, I suspected that delivering his speech in the midst of controversy and under threats of protests could not be easy.\u00a0\u00a0 Justice Thomas had recently returned to the Catholic faith of his childhood, and I was a recent Catholic convert.\u00a0 Perhaps emboldened by the zeal of the converted, I emailed him say that I would pray a Rosary for him before his talk.\u00a0 For those unfamiliar with the details, this Catholic devotion centers around mediation on \u201cmysteries,\u201d or moments in the life of Jesus.\u00a0 There are four sets of mysteries, each assigned a day of the week\u2014\u201cjoyful,\u201d \u201csorrowful,\u201d \u201cglorious,\u201d and \u201cluminous\u201d.\u00a0 The sorrowful mysteries are prayed on Tuesdays.\u00a0 I will never forget his response: \u201cThank you.\u00a0 I am going to pray a rosary too.\u00a0 But not the sorrowful mysteries, even if it is a Tuesday.\u00a0 Today, I need joy.\u201d<\/p>\n His talk was more than a mere success.\u00a0 It was a triumph.\u00a0 The counter protest fell flat, he was warmly welcomed, and his speech received a standing ovation.\u00a0 I believe the speech remains one of his finest hours.\u00a0 The speech is packed with wisdom and courage, and I regularly share it with students who ask me about Justice Thomas.\u00a0 But the most important lesson that I learned from that day came not from his words to the National Bar Association but his courage in the face of controversy and his response to the vitriol, a response captured in his email reply to me:\u00a0 Reject anger, embrace joy.\u00a0 Be principled and courageous.\u00a0 But always be a happy warrior.<\/p>\n The second icon is my walks with the Justice to daily mass at St. Joseph Catholic Church on Capitol Hill.\u00a0 Morning mass with the Justice is something that I will always treasure.\u00a0 I am sure that the priest\u2019s homilies imparted important wisdom, but the wisdom that I remember from those mornings came from our short walks to and from the Court to the church.\u00a0 After mass each day, the Justice waited outside on the steps for his \u201cladies,\u201d as he referred to the two older women (one white, one black) who would regale him with various stories and memories of childhood.\u00a0 (I remember a particularly animated one involving roller skating on the lot where the Supreme Court now sits.)\u00a0 No matter how busy his day ahead, he waited\u2014not because he had the time to spare, but because he knew that it mattered to them.[3]<\/sup><\/a>\u00a0 I recently asked the Justice if he remembered them, and he said, \u201cOh yes, Geraldine.\u00a0 She died, you know.\u00a0 The other was Ilsa.\u00a0 She always accompanied her mother.\u00a0 I miss those chats.\u201d\u00a0 Those chats, I believe, capture something important about Justice Thomas\u2014something that we all left chambers understanding more deeply:\u00a0 There is never anyone more important than the person in front of you.<\/p>\n Geraldine and Ilsa were not the only beneficiaries of this lesson.\u00a0 One day, he stopped to talk to a Capitol Police officer standing in front of the Hart Senate Office Building.\u00a0 He addressed him by his first name and asked about his son.\u00a0 As we walked away, I asked how he knew the man.\u00a0 He replied that he\u2019d gotten to know him when he worked for Senator Danforth, twenty years before<\/em>, and that the officer was very proud of his son who was in the seminary.\u00a0 I marveled that he could remember his name, let alone those details, after twenty years.\u00a0 Another day, a man who appeared to be homeless walked up to say something like \u201cJustice Thomas, I\u2019m sending you another petition!\u201d\u00a0 The security detail accompanying us tried to turn the man away, but the Justice waved them off and talked to the man for a few minutes.\u00a0 As we returned to the Court, he remarked, \u201cYou know, these are hard days for him.\u00a0 It was recently the anniversary of his mother\u2019s death.\u201d\u00a0 I was stunned:\u00a0 In a city full of people who spend every conversation looking over each other\u2019s shoulder to see if someone more important is in the room, Justice Thomas stopped to be kind to a homeless man who was mourning the loss of his mother.\u00a0 Nobody was ever more important than the person in front of him.<\/p>\n The third icon is Justice Thomas at the 1999 Daytona 500.\u00a0\u00a0 Justice Thomas is a huge NASCAR fan, and NASCAR got wind of this fact and invited him to serve as the Grand Marshal of the Daytona 500.\u00a0 My husband and I had the good fortune to accompany him to the event.\u00a0 In addition to the opportunity to take \u201chot laps\u201d around the track the day before the race, we also spent the morning of the race with Justice and Mrs. Thomas as they toured the speedway grounds.\u00a0\u00a0 Justice Thomas was completely immersed in the activity\u2014crawling under car to look at the \u201crestrictor plates\u201d (whatever they are) and peppering the drivers with questions about their pit crews.\u00a0 It was something out of a scene from the movie \u201cCars\u201d that featured a Supreme Court justice wearing a leather jacket with the Daytona logo and racing stripes plastered on it.\u00a0 (That jacket was something to behold.) And then came the moment that everyone was waiting for\u2014the most famous words in racing\u2014Clarence Thomas, the Grand Marshal of the Daytona 500, in his deep booming voice, proclaimed to the cheering crowds, \u201cGENTLEMEN, START YOUR ENGINES<\/em>!\u201d\u00a0 (Afterward, a woman came up to him and said, \u201cJudge, you did a real good job.\u201d)\u00a0 When he returned to the Court the following week, the Justice wore his leather Daytona 500 jacket to Conference and reported, with great amusement, that his colleagues did not fully appreciate it.<\/p>\n At the Daytona 500, Justice Thomas was a man of the people, a man with his people<\/em>.\u00a0 He was the same man who welcomed the janitorial staff into his chambers to needle them after his NFL team (the Cowboys) defeated theirs (the Redskins).\u00a0 (We couldn\u2019t hear the conversation, but the laughter boomed throughout the office.)\u00a0 At the Daytona 500, he was the same man who parks his RV overnight in Walmart parking lots so he can interact with \u201creal Americans.\u201d\u00a0 He was the man who, choking back tears upon his nomination to the Supreme Court, thanked his grandparents who raised him and the nuns who taught him in Savannah\u2019s segregated Catholic schools.\u00a0 The man who told the nation that day that \u201conly in America could this have been possible:\u201d only in America could a man raised in poverty in the segregated south rise to serve on the United States Supreme Court.\u00a0 And he was the man who never has never forgotten from whence he came\u2014and reminded us, in word and deed\u2014never to forget get it either, no matter how fortunate we might be.<\/p>\n The final icon is a conversation that my co-clerks and I had with Justice Thomas toward the end of our time with him that year.\u00a0 We were sitting in his chambers after the term had wrapped up, the opinions were finalized and decisions announced, talking about the year.\u00a0 And he brought up to his decision to join one of the Court\u2019s more than twenty unanimous opinions in that term.\u00a0 The case concerned an esoteric issue\u2014hardly anything hot button or, in our minds, consequential (although he would certainly remind us that all cases are consequential to the parties). \u00a0He told us that he had set a bad example for us in that case.\u00a0 \u201cI didn\u2019t agree with that opinion,\u201d he remarked. \u201cI should have dissented.\u201d\u00a0 And then he told us that, in life, not to emulate his decision to join the unanimous decision in that inconsequential case.\u00a0 \u201cDon\u2019t ever go along with something you think is wrong just because it is easy.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 Of the hundreds of hours we spent talking about cases that year, that conversation\u2014about a case whose name I cannot remember\u2014sticks with me most vividly for the lesson that he feared that he had failed to teach us.\u00a0 In matters large and small, do what is right, not what is easy or popular.<\/p>\n These four icons, and four lessons, remain with me:\u00a0 be courageous but joyful, even in the face of hostility and adversity; treat the person in front of you as the most important person in the world; never forget from whence you came; and never, ever, go along to get along.<\/p>\n In an important sense, these lessons are also captured in Justice Thomas\u2019s closing words to the National Bar Association in 1998:<\/p>\n I have come here today not in anger or to anger, though my mere presence has been sufficient, obviously, to anger some. Nor have I come to defend my views, but rather to assert my right to think for myself, to refuse to have my ideas assigned to me as though I was an intellectual slave because I\u2019m black. I come to state that I\u2019m a man, free to think for myself and do as I please. I\u2019ve come to assert that I am a judge and I will not be consigned the unquestioned opinions of others.<\/p>\n But even more than that, I have come to say that isn\u2019t it time to move on? Isn\u2019t it time to realize that being angry with me solves no problems? \u2026 Isn\u2019t it time that we respect ourselves and each other as we have demanded respect from others? Isn\u2019t it time to ignore those whose sole occupation is sowing seeds of discord and animus? That is self-hatred.\u00a0 Isn\u2019t it time to continue diligently to search for lasting solutions?\u00a0 I believe that the time has come today. God bless each of you, and may God keep you.[4]<\/a><\/p>\n And may God bless and keep Justice Clarence Thomas, a man whose goodness matches his greatness.\u00a0 The greatest man I have ever known.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n *<\/a> John P. Murphy Foundation Professor of Law, University of Notre Dame.\u00a0 Law clerk to Justice Clarence Thomas, October Term 1998.<\/p>\n [1]<\/a> William S. Consovoy & Nicole Stelle Garnett, \u201cTo Help, Not To Hurt\u201d: Justice Thomas\u2019s Equality Canon<\/em>, 127 Yale L.J. Forum 221 (2017); Nicole Stelle Garnett, \u201cBut for the Grace of God There Go I:\u201d Justice Thomas and the Little Guy, <\/em>4 N.Y.U. J.L. & Liberty 626 (2009).<\/p>\n [2]<\/a> I am now the same age as Justice Thomas was when I clerked for him, which I am sure makes us both feel old.<\/p>\n