“David and Peggy Sokol hosted us in Montana for a ranch visit and tour of Yellowstone,” the Thomases said in the letter, reviewed by The Times. The Thomases brought their dog Petey who played with the Sokols’ dog Bodie. They wrote: “Bodie shows Petey how to be a ranch dog, off leash! LIBERTY!”
The trip, they concluded, was “pure heaven for all of us!”
Taste the Good Life
The origin story of Clarence Thomas begins in a shack on the dirt floor of Pin Point, a small community built by formerly enslaved people on the salt flats outside of Savannah.
When he was 20, after a brief spell at a Roman Catholic seminary, he went on to the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass., where he was one of a small group of young Black men who integrated into the school. There, in the spring of 1971, his senior year, he received a letter from Yale Law School. He worries that the thin envelope means a rejection. But one of the most elite law schools in the country wanted him.
“My heart trembled and my spirit lifted,” Justice Thomas wrote in his autobiography.
At Yale, he was one of only 12 Black students in his law school class, admitted the year the law school introduced an affirmative action plan. His white classmates saw him as a symbol, he felt — a belief in the harmful effects of affirmative action that was only deepened by his failure to win the job at the law firm of his dreams.
“I graduated from one of the top law schools in America, but racial prejudice robbed my achievement of its true value,” he later wrote. Separately, he described leaving Yale as a new father, with “a swirling combination of frustration, some frustrations, some anxiety about the future, and some anxiety about how I’m going to pay my bills.” student loans, how I feed a child, where I live.”
