OAN Staff Katherine Mosack and Brooke Mallory
4:34 PM – Thursday, May 7, 2026
As the first baby boomer to join the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS), Clarence Thomas has achieved a historic milestone by becoming the second-longest-serving justice in the institution’s history.
Thomas has now reached approximately 34 years and 195 days on the bench, surpassing the tenure of Justice Stephen J. Field, who served from 1863 to 1897.
Appointed at age 43 by former President George H.W. Bush, Thomas assumed his seat in October 1991 to succeed Justice Thurgood Marshall. In doing so, he became the second Black justice to serve on the Court, following in the footsteps of Marshall, the civil rights attorney who famously argued Brown v. Board of Education.
Now 77-years-old, Thomas is steadily approaching the all-time record held by Justice William O. Douglas, who served for 36 years, seven months, and eight days between 1939 and 1975. Should Thomas continue his tenure, he is on track to surpass Douglas and become the longest-serving justice in American history on May 21, 2028.
Throughout his time on the bench, Thomas’ judicial style has evolved significantly. For much of his early career, he was remembered for his prolonged silence during oral arguments, once going nearly a decade without asking a single question.
He maintained that listening was more productive than interrupting counsel with the rapid-fire questioning favored by his colleagues. This approach shifted permanently during the COVID-19 pandemic. After the Court adopted a structured telephonic format in 2020, Thomas began questioning lawyers regularly — a practice he has maintained since the transition back to in-person arguments.
The court itself has also evolved around Thomas during his tenure. When he first joined, it was seen as more ideologically mixed. Thomas’ conservative views, however, have gradually become less isolated and more influential within the panel.
“He’s incredibly consistent,” Scott Gerber, author of “First Principles: The Jurisprudence of Clarence Thomas,” said of Thomas. “He says what he thinks and he does what he says.”
The court has slowly come to adopt positions Thomas held for years, including stronger Second Amendment protections and skepticism over racist affirmative action policies.
Most notably, the majority eventually embraced his career-long skepticism of the Constitutional “right” to abortion. In the 2022 decision Dobbs v. Jackson, Thomas joined the majority to overturn Roe v. Wade, ending nearly 50 years of federal abortion protections — a judicial outcome he had first advocated for shortly after joining the bench.
“For that reason, in future cases, we should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents … Because any substantive due process decision is ‘demonstrably erroneous,’ we have a duty to ‘correct the error’ established in those precedents,” he said at the time.
According to the Supreme Court Historical Society, Thomas graduated from the College of the Holy Cross in 1971 and from Yale Law School in 1974. He was admitted to the Missouri bar and became an Assistant Attorney General of the State of Missouri in 1974.
In 1981, Thomas was appointed Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights in the United States Department of Education. The next year, he was named Chairman of the United States Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which he served until 1990, when Bush appointed him to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia (D.C.) Circuit — a year before also being appointed to the Constitutional Court.
Childhood
Thomas was born in 1948 in Pin Point, Montgomery, Georgia, a small, impoverished coastal community founded by freedmen. His father abandoned the family when he was just two years old, leaving his mother, Leola, to raise three children in a wooden shack that lacked indoor plumbing and electricity.
The family spoke Gullah, a Creole language, as their primary tongue. After a fire destroyed their home in 1954, the family moved to a tenement in Savannah, but the continued financial struggle eventually led Leola to send Clarence and his younger brother, Myers, to live with their maternal grandparents, Myers and Christine Anderson, in 1955.
Living with his grandfather proved to be the most formative period of Thomas’s youth, as it provided him with his first experience of regular meals and modern amenities like indoor plumbing. Myers Anderson was a self-made entrepreneur who ran a fuel-oil delivery business and instilled a rigid work ethic and sense of self-reliance in his grandsons.
Under his grandfather’s strict guidance, Thomas spent his summers performing grueling manual labor, including farm work and building fences. His grandfather also insisted on a rigorous education, enrolling Thomas in segregated Catholic schools run by White nuns who demanded academic excellence.
As Thomas reached his teenage years, he initially aspired to enter the priesthood, attending St. Pius X High School before transferring to St. John Vianney Minor Seminary. At the seminary, he was one of the first Black students and faced persistent racial hazing and isolation from his White peers.
Despite these challenges, he excelled academically and graduated with top honors. However, his path toward the clergy ended in 1968 while he was at a seminary in Missouri. After witnessing classmates react joyfully to the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., Thomas became disillusioned with the Church’s stance on civil rights and decided to abandon his religious studies to pursue a career in law.
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