Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas became visibly emotional during a recent on-stage conversation as he described the vow he made after losing both grandparents in 1983, a promise to live the rest of his life as a memorial to theirs.
Thomas sat down with Hoover Institution fellow Peter Robinson for a wide-ranging discussion that turned deeply personal when the justice began talking about Myers and Christine Anderson, the maternal grandparents who raised him in Savannah, Georgia, during segregation. His voice broke. He paused to collect himself. Robinson offered to change the subject.
But Thomas pressed on, and what followed was a rare public window into the experiences that shaped one of the most consequential, and most polarizing, figures on the modern Supreme Court. The justice connected the values his grandparents instilled with the intellectual framework he later found in economist Thomas Sowell, drawing a straight line from a man with nine months of schooling to a scholar whose work gave him, as he put it, "permission to think differently from other Black leaders."
Thomas's father left when he was seven years old. His grandparents stepped in. Myers Anderson had nine months of formal education. Christine Anderson made it to the sixth grade. Neither ever set foot in a high school. They farmed on part of a plantation outside Savannah every summer.
None of that, Thomas told Robinson, was the point. The point was what they did with what they had.
Thomas described his grandfather in terms that left no room for ambiguity:
"My grandfather, no education, raised by a freed slave, and he never complained. He did it. He was just a great man. Now what do you do? How do you complain when he had nothing, no education? What do you say to it? But he sets this example of how you live your life."
Myers Anderson had a saying he repeated so often it became a household rule. Thomas recalled it with the cadence of someone who heard it a thousand times growing up:
"Old man can't is dead. I helped bury him."
"And the old man can't was buried many times in our house," Thomas added. For the Andersons, education was what Thomas called "the crown jewel", the thing they valued above everything else, even though they had almost none of it themselves. Catholic nuns provided the formal schooling. The grandparents provided the spine.
Thomas has never been shy about crediting those origins. He has pushed back publicly against critics who question whether his conservative philosophy is somehow at odds with his race or his background. The answer, for Thomas, always circles back to Savannah.
Both grandparents died suddenly in 1983. Thomas did not elaborate on the circumstances, but the weight of the loss was plain. His voice faltered as he described what came next:
"When both my grandparents died suddenly in 1983, the decision I made was to live the rest of my life as a memorial to theirs."
Robinson stepped in gently after the moment. "All right. Watch this because I'm going to lighten the mood here," the Hoover fellow said. Thomas gathered himself and kept going.
That promise, to honor his grandparents by living as they taught him, is the thread Thomas used to connect his upbringing to the intellectual tradition he found later in Thomas Sowell's work. The justice said rediscovering Sowell gave him a framework that matched what he had already learned at the kitchen table.
Thomas has carried that framework into public life with a consistency that frustrates his opponents. He has spoken bluntly about elite institutions he believes have closed their doors to conservative thought, and he has shown little interest in softening his positions for polite company.
Thomas told Robinson that Sowell's book *Race and Economics* captured something he recognized immediately, the idea that self-reliance, self-discipline, and the right attitudes matter more than grievance. Thomas explained the connection in terms that were personal, not academic:
"Well, I think it's something that Professor Sowell has been trying to stress, that a lot of the groundwork to being able to do difficult things, to achieve, are attitudes. And he talks about other groups. And that's what attracted me initially to 'Race and Economics,' because if you go back and you look at 'Race and Economics,' he talks about attitude of self-reliance, of self-discipline, etc., how important those were."
Then Thomas closed the circle. The values Sowell described in an economics text were the same values a man with nine months of schooling had drilled into him decades earlier.
"Where did I first hear that? I heard it from my grandfather, the single greatest man I've ever known, my grandmother, a saintly woman, my nuns. Same thing. It's the exact same thing."
It was not a complaint about what the Andersons lacked. Thomas made that explicit. His grandparents' philosophy centered on capacity, not grievance:
"It wasn't taking the measure of what you don't have. It wasn't to complain about that, but to develop the capacity to do things that you needed to do in order to... improve your life."
That outlook has made Thomas a target for decades. Critics on the left have questioned his legitimacy, his motives, and even his identity. Thomas, now the longest-serving member of the current Court, has met that scrutiny with characteristic indifference, walking past hostile questions the way his grandfather walked past obstacles, by refusing to stop.
The broader Court itself continues to draw intense public attention. Justice Samuel Alito recently confirmed he has no plans to retire, quieting speculation about the bench's composition. Thomas, for his part, gave no indication he is slowing down. The conversation with Robinson was the kind of appearance a man makes when he still has something to say, and no intention of leaving the stage.
Thomas did not frame his remarks as nostalgia. He framed them as a living commitment. The promise he made in 1983 was not a eulogy. It was a mission statement, one that has guided every opinion he has written, every public stand he has taken, and every refusal to bend to institutional pressure.
And the emotional weight of the moment made something clear. Forty-three years after Myers and Christine Anderson died, their grandson still measures himself against the standard they set, two people with almost no formal education who built a life on discipline, faith, and the stubborn belief that excuses are a luxury no one can afford.
Washington could use a few more people raised by grandparents like that.
