Clarence Thomas is conspicuously absent in new Black History

Posted: Oct 5, 2016

Justice Clarence Thomas, the second black man to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court, is practically absent from the new National Museum of African American History and Culture. Anita Hill, the woman who accused Thomas of sexual harassment, however, is given prominent billing in the museum. The new Smithsonian, which opened in September, gives Hill pride of place in an exhibit on blacks in the 1990s. The exhibit features testimonies trumpeting her courage and the surge of women’s activism that ensued, while making only peripheral reference to the nation’s second black Supreme Court justice. There is no showcase of Thomas’s own life and career, which ran its own harsh gauntlet of racial discrimination.;