After Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall announced his retirement, President George H.W. Bush announced on July 1, 1991, his pick for Marshall's successor: Clarence Thomas, a 43-year-old US Court of Appeals judge. The nomination was political from the start — Thomas's record was decidedly more conservative than that of the civil rights icon he'd be replacing.
But Thomas's road to the Supreme Court would become much more dramatic after the public learned about a woman named Anita Hill, a 35-year-old black attorney whose allegations of sexual harassment against Thomas — her former boss at the Department of Education and later the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission — were leaked to the public just days before his confirmation hearing.
The ensuing three-day hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee was a monumental moment of political theater and is now the basis of HBO's new film Confirmation, starring Kerry Washington and Wendell Pierce, premiering April 16.
But as the film shows, this wasn't just partisan drama — its themes of racism, sexism, and the intersection of the two resonate 25 years later. And although allegations of racism against Thomas derailed the conversation about Hill's accusations in the moment, the hearing irrevocably changed the way Americans view sexual harassment in the workplace.
"A high-tech lynching for uppity blacks"
After his retirement, Marshall was asked at a press conference if race should play a role in choosing his successor. He said the goal was "picking the best person for the job, not on the basis of race one way or another."
"My dad told me way back that you can’t use race," Marshall said. "For example, there’s no difference between a white snake and a black snake. They’ll both bite. So I don’t want to use race as an excuse."
Bush similarly echoed to reporters that there shouldn't "be a black seat on the court or an ethnic seat on the court," instead reiterating Thomas was the "best man" for the job. Neither Bush nor Marshall wanted race to frame the conversation surrounding Thomas's nomination, but race would become a primary focus of his confirmation hearing.
The public learned Hill accused Thomas of hitting on her repeatedly, later making vulgar comments and showing her pornographic material when she did not reciprocate. Thomas addressed the allegations directly in his opening statement before the Senate Judiciary Committee, denying "each and every single allegation" of sexual harassment, apologizing if his actions had been misconstrued, and accusing committee members' staffers of leaking Hill's allegations to the press. He infamously called the proceedings "a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks":
It's a national disgrace. And from my standpoint, as a black American, as far as I'm concerned, it is a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves, to do for themselves, to have different ideas, and it is a message that unless you kowtow to the old order, this is what will happen to you. You will be lynched, destroyed, caricatured by a committee of the US Senate rather than hung from a tree.
With that, Thomas set the terms of the conversation. Sitting in front of an all-white, all-male Senate Judiciary Committee, he strategically changed the focus of the hearing from sexual harassment allegations against him to alleged racist politicking from the Senate.
Beyond deflecting sexism by alleging only racism was at play, Thomas's statement was also counterintuitive because people argued race wasn't supposed to decide his nomination.
It mattered that Anita Hill was not just a woman but a black woman
Thomas's lynching statement was remarkable, considering the metaphor was being used to discredit allegations made by Hill, who is also black. And yet there is a term for this power play: "misogynoir."
Misogynoir, a term created by Moya Bailey, the dean's postdoctoral fellow in digital humanities and women's, gender, and sexuality studies at Northeastern University, refers to the unique ways black women experience the compounding effects of anti-black racism and misogyny.
In a recent interview with Essence, Melissa Harris-Perry asked Hill what she thought about Thomas's statement. Hill called Thomas's statement "outrageous," citing the fact that her grandfather was "threatened with an actual lynching."
Still, Hill contended that the hearing wasn't just about race. It was also about the particular vulnerabilities black women face, even when talking about an issue that impacts many women in general:
Those members of Congress had never even considered that Black women had our own political voice. They assumed that Black men spoke for us. For an African-American woman to have her own political voice and own political position, and to believe that our perspective should be added to the conversation, was just something they hadn't even considered.
The cards were stacked against Hill from the beginning because she is a woman.
But when Thomas compared the hearing to a lynching, he likened the allegations toward him to the racist stereotype that black men are hypersexual. This deflected Hill's sexual harassment claims against him, and fueled ideas that Hill was somehow a "race traitor."
Throughout the hearing, committee members were hostile to Hill, and showed little understanding of sexual harassment, including criticizing her "lateness" in bringing forth the allegations. One Senator flat-out refuted Hill's statements, saying Thomas "denied ever having asked her out or talked to her about anything like that."
The senators asked Hill to repeatedly recount sexually explicit details of her allegations — from Thomas allegedly calling his penis "Long Dong Silver" to announcing in a work setting that he'd found a pubic hair on a Coke can.
Hill was put on the defensive because of both her race and her gender, feeding into racist stereotypes about black women's sexuality.
"If you think about the way the hearings were structured, the hearings were really about Thomas' race and my gender," Hill said in 2002. "It was as if I had no race or that my race wasn't significant in the assessments that people made about the truthfulness of my statements … [But] how do you think certain people would have reacted if I had come forward and been white, blond-haired and blue-eyed?"
After three days of "he said, she said," a New York Times poll found Americans overwhelmingly believed Thomas — 58 percent compared with 24 percent of people who believed Hill. And on October 15, 1991, the Senate voted 52 to 48 to confirm Thomas to the Supreme Court, the narrowest margin in a century.
When Hill was silenced, women fought harder to be heard
Decades after the confirmation hearing, Thomas remains one of the most conservative justices on the Supreme Court, garnering a reputation as "the anti–Thurgood Marshall," notably ruling to strike down Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act in 2013.
Hill, now a professor at Brandeis University, faced public backlash, threats of death and sexual violence, and a campaign to remove her from her job after the hearing. But she had a profound impact on women back in 1991: She stood alone, before the nation, to reveal a secret many women felt pressured to bear privately.
Her appearance became a catalyst for change. The following year was designated the "Year of the Woman" after women across the political spectrum ran for public office in record numbers. This was seen as a direct response to the treatment Hill received from the Senate, which was then 98 percent male.
Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) was reelected, and four other women were elected to the Senate that year. The wave included Carol Moseley-Braun from Illinois, the first African-American woman senator and the second African American to serve in the Senate since Reconstruction. The number of women in the House of Representatives increased from 28 to 47.
And the spike in sexual harassment claims showed Hill was not alone. Hill's testimony helped other women identify the unwanted sexual advances they'd experienced. In 1992, the EEOC saw a 71 percent increase in sexual harassment claims, continuing throughout the decade and peaking in 2000 with 15,836 claims.
A year after the hearing, a Wall Street Journal poll also found that national opinion had flipped in favor of Hill (44 percent) to Thomas (34 percent).
Hill speculated that the change in perspective in the months since the hearing had to do with the fact that people were more aware of sexual harassment than before.
"I think people have just become more thoughtful about the hearings and about the issue itself and the theories that were just spun out of nothing that were thrown at them to explain my motives," she told the New York Times.
And yet even though Hill was initially silenced, women rose up to ensure no woman experiencing sexual harassment would ever be so easily ignored again.