Last month the new Smithsonian Museum celebrating black history opened. Unfortunately, the political slant involved in the museum does not give an accurate picture of black history nor does it provide a picture that promotes any sort of healing of race relations in America.
The Daily Caller noted in an October 3 article that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas is barely mentioned in the museum. However, Anita Hill, who accused him of sexual harassment is given a place of prominence.
The article reports:
“I am not surprised that Justice Thomas’ inspiring life story is not a part of the new museum,” Mark Paoletta, an assistant White House Counsel in the George H. W. Bush administration who worked on the Thomas confirmation, told The Daily Caller News Foundation. “Civil rights leaders have tried for decades to malign Justice Thomas because he actually dares to have his own views on race issues. One prominent liberal Supreme Court practitioner has called Justice Thomas ‘our greatest Justice,’ but you would never know that listening to the civil rights leadership.”
The exclusion is especially odd given Thomas’ intimate experience with racial discrimination.
Thomas was born in Georgia’s coastal lowlands among impoverished Gullah-speakers. By his own account, he did not master the Queen’s English until his early 20s. He came of age in Jim Crow Savannah, where he was in turn ridiculed by white neighbors and classmates for his unpolished style, one of many indignities typical of his adolescence in the racist south. The startling racial injustices of his youth, by discipline and sheer force of will, gave way to the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass. and Yale Law School.
It is a shame that young visitors to the museum will not be able to read his inspiring story. It is also a shame that a women who had no evidence for her charges against Justice Thomas and who followed him from job to job a number of times ( why would she do that if she were being sexually harassed?) is given a place of prominence. As I have said before, “I thought only communist countries rewrote history.”