Created Equal: Clarence Thomas in His Own Words

I suppose I drew the short stick, so to speak. Michael Pack’s documentary Created Equal: Clarence Thomas in His Own Words tells the life story of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas…in his own words. If I were to guess, the majority of readers want me to hate this film, while a sizeable silent majority is secretly interested in hearing what Justice Thomas has to say.

In Created Equal, Justice Clarence Thomas and his wife Virginia tell his life story using over 30 hours of interview time, personal photos, and archival news footage and does not shy away from the big moments of his life.

Born in 1948, Clarence Thomas grew up in Pin Point, Georgia, by his single mother, along with his older brother. Throughout the documentary, Thomas credits much of his success to his grandfather Myers Anderson, who instilled in him the value of hard work and self-reliance.

“…Clarence Thomas and his wife Virginia tell his life story using over 30 hours of interview time, personal photos, and archival news footage…”

From the start, his mother and grandfather enrolled him in Catholic school, believing public school was useless. Over the years, he would become a devout Catholic and decide that he would eventually become a priest. In his second year of high school, he entered seminary with a warning from his grandfather that he could not quit and see seminary through to completion.

While in seminary, everything changed when fellow students told him that they wished Martin Luther King, Jr. dead and celebrated his assassination. Thomas would quit seminary in outrage and when he told his grandfather of his decision (for noble reasons), Thomas was cut off from his grandfather’s good graces for quitting. He was told since he made an adult decision, he would now live as an adult. Thomas was now financially responsible for his own education.

Thomas would then attend the only school that would accept him, which was College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts. Here Thomas joins the campus Black Power movement and becomes a Marxist anti-war protestor. His older brother, who served in Viet Nam, would have nothing to do with him and neither would his grandfather vehemently disapproved of his associations.