Thirty-six years ago, the NAACP had an opportunity to block Clarence Thomas’ path to the Supreme Court. But after a secret meeting between the Black Republican rising star and Althea Simmons, the civil rights organization’s Washington Bureau director, the NAACP blinked.

Now, as the nation awaits the Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais, a voting rights case that threatens to gut the all-important Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, Thomas looms large among the High Court’s conservative majority as a leading provocateur of such a decision.

How it came to be that Thurgood Marshall, the nation’s first Black Supreme Court Justice, was replaced by Thomas, is a story worth examining. It is the story of how the architect of the NAACP legal campaign that broke the back of Jim Crow, and won passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, was succeeded by someone who as a GOP political appointee had a demonstrated record of opposition to affirmative action and the anti-discrimination laws he was supposed to enforce.

And ironically, it is the story of how Marshall, the civil rights icon who at the time of his retirement in 1991 was seen by many as the Supreme Court’s most liberal justice, was replaced by Thomas, who has devoted his time on the court to unraveling the achievements of his predecessor, and is now widely viewed as the High Court’s most conservative jurist.

This account of the missteps that allowed Thomas to get an unchallenged appointment to the appeals court that is a pipeline for the Supreme Court, and then to win confirmation to the nation’s High Court without a full-court press being mounted to block him, is a story of how the civil rights community fractured and how the NAACP—the nation’s oldest and most influential civil rights organization—was outmaneuvered by Thomas’ supporters for influence in America’s “Black street.”

The story begins on October 30, 1989.

In what some people saw as a cynical act of revenge, President George H.W. Bush nominated Clarence Thomas to replace Robert Bork on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. President Ronald Reagan had named Bork to that bench in 1981 and then tried to elevate him to the Supreme Court in 1987. But Bork’s belief that judges should only interpret the Constitution based on the original intent of its authors drew heavy fire from abortion rights and civil rights groups. Their opposition produced a stormy confirmation hearing and a crushing 58-42 vote to reject Bork’s nomination.

Dejected, Bork resigned from his Court of Appeals position in January 1988. Later that year Bush, who had been Reagan’s vice president, was elected president. Soon after taking office, he nominated Thomas for a seat on the appeals court.

Bush did this “with the…expectation that (Thomas) might be a potential nominee to the Supreme Court in the future” said Wade Henderson, who became the NAACP’s chief lobbyist and Washington Bureau chief following Simmons’ death in September 1991. “Clarence well knew that his reputation and record were such that he would likely be challenged, perhaps even opposed by most African American civil rights organizations,” Henderson told me. “He was astute enough to realize that Althea Simmons was likely to be the gatekeeper for civil rights groups in deciding how to approach his nomination.”

So, shortly before his confirmation hearing in March 1990, Thomas met secretly with Simmons in a Washington, D.C. hospital where she had undergone knee surgery and was being treated for a respiratory illness.

In an interview earlier this year, Henderson, who was associate director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Washington office before he replaced Simmons, explained the meeting between Thomas and Simmons this way: “Althea was charmed by Thomas. He misstated his positions on key issues like affirmative action and equal opportunity…I think the record would suggest he lied.”

Why Simmons agreed to see Thomas during her hospitalization is unclear. Even more perplexing is why the decision on what position the NAACP would take on Thomas’ nomination to the appeals court was left to a hospitalized member of the NAACP’s senior staff. Standing off to the side was Benjamin Hooks, the NAACP’s Executive Director and CEO, a position he’d held since 1977. He was also a political chameleon.

In 1965, Tennessee’s Democratic Governor appointed Hooks to a criminal court judgeship in Memphis. In 1972, President Richard Nixon named him the first Black commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission.

Once an active member of the Republican Party, Hooks switched to the Democratic Party after being a delegate to the GOP’s 1964 national convention. In 1980 he became the first Black person to address both the Democratic and Republican national conventions in the same year.

As head of the NAACP, Hooks led the civil rights community’s successful 1987 campaign to block Bork’s Supreme Court appointment and played a pivotal role in preventing Bush from making William Lucas his assistant attorney general for civil rights.

Soon after Thomas met with Simmons, the NAACP announced it would neither support nor oppose Thomas’ appointment to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. Looking back at the NAACP’s decision to remain neutral on Thomas’ nomination, Hooks told me during a 1992 interview that he deferred to Simmons.

Henderson saw this turn of events differently. “…there were many African Americans, particularly senior leaders, who were desperate to have an African American on the Court of Appeals and on the Supreme Court,” he told me. “They knew that Thurgood Marshall was coming to the end of his extraordinary tenure as an Associate Justice on the court and they were hopeful that George Herbert Walker Bush would appoint another Black person to fill his seat.”

Simmons came away from her meeting with Thomas believing he deserved the opportunity to prove himself. So, from her hospital bed she announced that the NAACP would take a neutral position on his nomination to the appeal court—and Hooks backed her decision.

Henderson believes Hooks was comfortable with Simmons taking the lead in making that decision for the NAACP because it gave him cover. “Hooks was a Republican to his core, and he wanted to support a Republican nominee,” Henderson said. Simmons’ announcement effectively elevated Thomas “to the seat on the (appeals) court. Without her position of neutrality, he would have faced many challenges and, perhaps, may even have been defeated in his confirmation bid…and would never have been nominated to the Supreme Court.”

On March 5, 1990, Jet magazine, a bible of Black news and events that had a weekly circulation of nearly one million copies, published a full-page article, titled: “NAACP Neutral on Thomas Appeals Court Nomination; Committee Deliberating.”

The story, which was accompanied by a picture of Thomas, his wife and son, standing with Senate Judiciary Chairman Joe Biden (D-Del) and Missouri Republican Sen. John Danforth, left little doubt that the NAACP’s neutrality cleared the way for Thomas’ confirmation to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia—which was the catbird seat to the U.S. Supreme Court.

“A secret 2 ½ -hour meeting with NAACP Washington Bureau Director Althea Simmons broke a threatened Liberal-Democratic campaign against EEOC Chairman Clarence Thomas’ nomination to the U.S. Courts of Appeals in Washington.

President Bush nominated the Yale Law School graduate and former Missouri assistant attorney general to serve on the 12-member panel described as the second most powerful court next to the U.S. Supreme Court. Conservatives hail the ranking Black Reagan-Bush judicial appointee as the possible replacement to Justice Thurgood Marshall.

Faced with a dilemma of opposing the scholarly, respected conservative lawyer on the basis of “personal views and his EEOC record of carrying out court dictates,” Ms. Simmons decided on an eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation with Thomas on the eve of the Senate confirmation hearing.

Confirming that Mr. Thomas “understands” the role of Blacks, the role of courts and the duties of a federal judge, Ms. Simmons recommended that the nation’s leading civil rights organization neither oppose the Thomas nomination, nor endorse it. The neutral position, however, cancelled what was expected to be a prolonged hearing on Capitol Hill.

Speaking to a packed Judiciary Committee hearing, Thomas promised he would not apply his personal views on the law in reaching judicial decisions. “My personal view, when there is a precedent, when there is case law, is irrelevant,” he testified. “In the policy arena, one has options. In the judicial arena, the rule of law applies.”

The following day, March 6, 1990, the U.S. Senate, by voice vote, confirmed Thomas to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. Only two members of the upper chamber—Democrats Howard Metzenbaum, of Ohio, and David Pryor, of Arkansas—recorded their opposition.

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Fifteen months after the NAACP’s position of neutrality gave Clarence Thomas an unimpeded road to becoming a federal appeals court judge, the chickens came home to roost. On June 27, 1991, Justice Thurgood Marshall sent this letter of resignation to the White House.

My Dear Mr. President:

The strenuous demands of court work and its related duties required or expected of a justice appear at this time to be incompatible with my advancing age and medical condition.

I, therefore, retire as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States when my successor is qualified.

Respectfully,

Thurgood Marshall

A day later, Marshall made his way into a Supreme Court conference room to meet with journalists. As he sank heavily into a chair, his deep breaths causing his shoulders to heave, the High Court’s first Black justice showed signs of the physical decline that pushed him to abruptly end his lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court. But despite the visual evidence of his ailing body, Marshall quickly put to rest any doubts journalists may have had about his mental sharpness—and his sense of humor—when he answered the first question that was put to him.

“How do you feel, justice?” a reporter shouted to the 82-year-old Marshall.

“With my hands,” he deadpanned.

The room erupted with laughter. For the next 20 minutes, Marshall parried the questions that followed—with one very telling exception. When asked if he believed President George H.W. Bush had an obligation to name a Black person to replace him, Marshall scoffed at the idea.

“I don’t think that that should be a ploy, and I don’t think it should be used as an excuse one way or the other,” he said.

“An excuse for what, Justice?” a reporter pressed him.

“Doing wrong,” Marshall shot back. “I mean for picking the wrong Negro and saying, ‘I’m picking him because he’s a Negro.’ I’m opposed to that…My dad told me way back that you can’t use race. For example, there’s no difference between a Black snake and a White snake. They’ll both bite,” Marshall said.

His words, it seemed, were intended for a different audience. The ailing jurist knew that the sentiment among Blacks was strong that he be replaced by another Black person. But he worried that there would be a blind push for another Black on the High Court, one that placed race over reason.

On June 27, 1991—the same day he had a courier deliver his resignation letter to the White House—Marshall signaled in his dissenting opinion in Payne v. Tennessee that he believed his replacement should not be someone who would overturn precedent for personal or political reasons.

“Power, not reason, is the new currency of this Court’s decision-making,” he wrote in his last opinion.

On July 1, 1991, President George H.W. Bush walked out of a cabin on his family’s Kennebunkport, Maine compound to announce that Clarence Thomas was his choice to replace Thurgood Marshall, the towering hero of the nation’s struggle for racial justice.

Just as quickly civil rights groups splintered over how they should respond.

“There were many candidates who were far superior to Clarence Thomas in terms of academics, achievements, background,” Henderson recalled. “William Coleman, who had been the secretary of transportation, and several other Black Republicans with stellar legal resumes, were proposed by people who wanted to elevate the best Black Republican to the Supreme Court. Instead, George Herbert Walker Bush chose an ideologue whose views on key issues of race and equality closely mirrored the far reaches of the conservative wing of the Bush administration.”

By the time the NAACP gathered in Houston, Texas for its national convention on July 10, 1991, Thomas’ supporters had already flooded the media with accounts of his “up from poverty” rise from a sharecropper’s family in Pinpoint, Georgia, to Yale Law School and soon, they hoped, to the pinnacle of America’s legal system.

And public opinion polls showed that it was working. Days after Bush said Thomas was his choice to replace Marshall, a CNN/Gallup poll found that 52 percent of Americans supported his decision. Around the same time, a USA TODAY poll found that 54 percent of Black respondents wanted Thomas to be confirmed.

The polling also seemed to reflect a split among decision-makers at the NAACP Convention.

“There was very strong opposition (within the NAACP) to Judge Thomas at that time,” Henderson recalled. “There were some who supported him. There were divisions, I think it is fair to say. But Hooks, and here I think the record would suggest that he was quietly supporting Thomas, felt that the way to go was largely the way that Althea Simmons had paved: a position of neutrality.

“He recognized that the NAACP could not support Thomas. His record was so atrocious that it would be a betrayal of the founding principles of the NAACP to support Judge Thomas. But he also felt that if he could engineer a position of neutrality that would be as good as supporting him because organizations that would otherwise consider opposing him would feel constrained…and that would virtually guarantee Thomas’ confirmation,” Henderson said.

But in a recorded conversation that I had with him in 1992, Hooks had a different recollection of the mood of the people who attended the NAACP’s 1991 convention.

“We had a very volatile, big, fat convention; 2, 3 or 4 thousand delegates, activists and people from everywhere. There was not a single delegate that got on that floor that said let’s deal with the Thomas nomination,” Hooks told me. “That convention was as dazed and caught up in the trauma of not wanting to be the killing agent of a Black (Supreme Court nominee) without having every good and sufficient reason” to do so.

On Sunday, July 14, 1991, the day the NAACP convention closed, the Baltimore Sun reported that the organization’s 64-member board “took up the Thomas question, split over it, and decided to postpone action on it while they reviewed Judge Thomas’ record.”

To do this, the NAACP sought a meeting with Thomas, and Hooks assigned Henderson the task of researching the Supreme Court nominee’s record on issues of importance to the civil rights group. But while the NAACP delayed taking a position on Thomas, the civil rights community that looked to it for leadership began to fracture over the Black conservative’s fitness to sit on the Supreme Court.

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On July 12, 1991, the 26-member Congressional Black Caucus split over Thomas. Nineteen members voted to oppose his selection. The group’s lone Republican voted in favor of his appointment, and six other Caucus members took no position, producing a surprising split decision among the Black members of Congress.

Ten days later, the National Urban League struck a white flag. On July 22, 1991, John Jacob, the organization’s president, told The New York Times: “Our position is not to oppose (Thomas), not to be his advocate, not to be his defender, but simply not to oppose him and let the Senate do its job.”

Then possibly sensing his double speak, the Urban League’s leader offered this explanation of what sounded like a retreat from the civil rights battlefield: “The truth of the matter is that Clarence Thomas’ addition to the Court is an academic one because if you lose 5 to 4, or if you lose 6 to 3, you still lose in that arena. I think, fundamentally, we’re prepared to live with what we don’t think is going to be a favorable position for us for a long time.”

This waffling—and the NAACP’s silence—gave Thomas’ supporters what would prove to be an insurmountable lead in the court of public opinion—and in the race to win a confirmation vote in the Senate, where Democrats held a 57 to 43 majority.

Hooks had given Henderson until the end of July to produce the report on Thomas. “I’m turning it over to you,” he told Henderson. “I don’t want it to be said that I tried to sway the report in one way or the other. I’m going to give you carte blanche to prepare the document,” Hooks said.

Henderson quickly recruited three of the nation’s most highly regarded Black intellectuals and social scientists—civil rights activist and historian Mary Frances Berry, legal scholar and civil rights litigator Charles Ogletree, and historian John Hope Franklin—to help research and write the report.

While stopping short of recommending that the NAACP oppose Thomas’ confirmation, the report was a damning assessment of the Supreme Court nominee’s civil rights record. In his epilogue, Franklin, the emeritus professor of history at Duke University, looked at Clarence Thomas and saw the worst of Booker T. Washington.

“Washington believed African Americans would have to work up gradually through programs of self-help before they could attain anything resembling power or respectability. Meanwhile, he enjoyed virtually unlimited access to the center of political and economic influence,” Franklin said in drawing a parallel between the leading Black apologist for those who mistreated Blacks at the beginning of the 20^th century and Thomas, whose policy and legal decisions positioned him as a linear successor to Washington.

On the night of July 30, 1991, Henderson went to Hooks to deliver his office’s report on Thomas. He walked into the executive director’s room at the Washington Court Hotel with Elaine Jones and Julius Chambers, of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund (LDF), which was founded by Thurgood Marshall during his time as a civil rights litigator. The LDF separated from the NAACP in 1957.

As it turned out, a copy of the report had leaked to The New York Times and Hooks was aware of its contents when Henderson arrived.

“He looks up at me, and he starts cursing, almost scatologically,” Henderson said of Hooks. “He was totally losing it…He criticizes the report. He just didn’t like its findings. He was especially furious about the John Hope Franklin epilogue, which he knew put a nail in the coffin” for the decision that the NAACP would make the next day about Thomas’ fitness to join the Supreme Court.

If that wasn’t bad enough, the NAACP board would have one other thing to consider: a six-page confidential report on the secret meeting a small delegation of NAACP officials had with Thomas days earlier.

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On the afternoon of July 19, 1991, two black limousines drove slowly down a narrow street in the Capitol Hill section of Washington, D.C. before stopping outside the home of Constance Newman. Eleven people, including Hooks, Henderson and NAACP board chairman William Gibson, quickly made their way into the house that was a short walk from the Supreme Court.

Both sides in the secret gathering considered Newman’s home a safe space. The 56-year-old Black woman had deep roots in the NAACP—and in the Republican Party. As a child, Newman attended NAACP meetings with her father, who was president of the Tuskegee branch of the civil rights group. When George H.W. Bush was elected president in 1988, Newman headed his transition team’s efforts to find Black appointees. After she was named head of the Bush administration’s Office of Personnel Management, the NAACP put her on the cover of the August/September 1989 edition of The Crisis, its magazine, which was started by W.E.B. DuBois in 1910.

It was in Newman’s home that the NAACP would, for the second time in two years, get a chance to go “eyeball-to-eyeball” with Thomas. It had been in a similar showdown a year earlier that he convinced Althea Simmons to get the NAACP to back away from opposing his confirmation to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.

According to the NAACP’s confidential minutes, “all sides agreed neither to confirm nor deny the occurrence of the meeting.” Once that ground rule was established, Thomas, according to the minutes, largely told the NAACP group what it wanted to hear.

“Thomas said he supports affirmative action, but like most Americans, he opposes quotas,” he is recorded as having said. When questioned about his views on class action vs. individual case litigation, Thomas reportedly said” he supports class action efforts” and “he also stated that he supports goals and timetables as a remedy for discrimination, where findings of past discrimination have been established.”

When he was asked about his views on the Great Society Programs of President Lyndon Johnson, the confidential minutes noted that “Thomas conceded that his views may have been cast too broadly, in that he believed that some of the Great Society programs had been helpful.” Thomas also acknowledged the benefits of public health service programs, like the one he had relied on growing up in Pinpoint, Ga., according to the minutes.

After the 2 ½ hour meeting, Hazel Dukes, an influential board member from New York, “said that she felt Judge Thomas had confirmed his ‘blackness’ and “seemed to remember ‘where he came from,’ “according to the confidential minutes.

But, ultimately, Dukes’ reaction to Thomas’ charm offensive did not alter the board’s decision about whether he should succeed Marshall on the Supreme Court.

“We have concluded that Judge Thomas’ confirmation would be inimical to the best interests of African Americans,” NAACP chairman William Gibson said at a July 31, 1991, press conference. And then alluding to what he saw as a difference between what Thomas told him and others at the secret meeting on Capitol Hill and the public record of his actions, Gibson said: “Judge Thomas’ inconsistent views on civil rights policy make him an unpredictable element on an increasingly radical, conservative court.”

But, as it turned out, the NAACP’s opposition announcement—coming as it did a critical month after President Bush nominated Thomas to fill Marshall’s Supreme Court seat—was too late. After announcing the NAACP’s position on Thomas, ABC News anchor Diane Sawyer reported that a July 28 ABC News poll found that 58 percent of Whites—and 61 percent of Blacks—said they approved of the Thomas nomination. It was a lead for Thomas in the court of public opinion that his opponents would not be able to overtake.

Forty-five days later, the heavily Democratic U.S. Senate confirmed Clarence Thomas’ appointment to the Supreme Court. The vote was 52 to 48. Eleven Democrats joined 41 Republicans in voting for Thomas.

As it turned out, it seems that race mattered in a peculiar way.

In the end it was “the Black street,” not the civil rights and social justice elite of Black America that prevailed in the fight over Thomas’ nomination. From the moment President Bush presented Thomas to the nation’s media on July 1, 1991, Republicans talked about him as a Black success story. In their public pronouncements they put their spotlight on his escape from poverty, and the success that hard work got him. That earned him a big head start among Blacks who were then—and are now—the Democratic Party’s most loyal constituency.

He was publicly embraced by Margaret Bush Wilson, the first Black female chair of the NAACP’s board of directors, and by Maya Angelou, the Black literary icon whose voice resonated on the Black street in ways that few others did.

Six days before the NAACP board announced its opposition to Thomas, Angelou offered this lyrical praise of him in The New York Times: “Because Clarence Thomas has been poor, has been nearly suffocated by the acrid odor of racial discrimination, is intelligent, well trained, Black and young enough to be won over again, I support him.”

Her words of support were as superfluous as the words of condemnation that the NAACP issued for Thomas a few days later were unambiguous. But for all the great fights the nation’s largest and oldest civil rights organization waged, its greatest victories came in a court of law. And in those instances when it pushed Congress to action, it had the overwhelming support of the Black folks whose interests it championed. This was not the case with the nomination of Clarence Thomas, which caused a critical number of Senate Democrats to cast a political vote, not one of conscience.

Thomas’ supporters hawked him as a Black success story who deserved the embrace of other Blacks. And, if the polls were right, many Blacks believed the hype—dooming us for the past 35 years to suffer the consequences.

DeWayne Wickham, a former USA TODAY columnist, is the founding dean of Morgan State University’s School of Global Journalism & Communication. He is co-authoring a forthcoming book about the NAACP with Wade Henderson.

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