Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas fought back tears during a public conversation as he described the vow he made after both grandparents died suddenly in 1983, a promise that still drives him more than four decades later.
Thomas sat down with Hoover Institution fellow Peter Robinson for a wide-ranging discussion recorded August 11, and the longest-serving current justice turned a conversation about economics and self-reliance into something far more personal. When he reached the subject of Myers and Christine Anderson, the grandparents who raised him in segregated Savannah, Georgia, his voice broke.
The moment landed because of what Thomas said next. He told Robinson that after both grandparents died suddenly, he resolved to make the rest of his life count on their terms, not his own. Fox News reported that Thomas paused to gather himself before continuing, and Robinson stepped in to offer to "lighten the mood."
Thomas's father left when Thomas was seven. His mother sent him to live with her parents in Savannah. Myers Anderson had nine months of formal education. Christine Anderson made it to the sixth grade. Neither fact slowed them down.
Thomas recalled that his grandfather, raised by a freed slave, farmed on a plantation outside Savannah every summer and expected the same from the boys in his care. Education was the priority Anderson could not provide from his own experience but demanded from everyone under his roof.
Thomas put it plainly:
"Even though my grandfather only had nine months of education, the crown jewel was education. My grandmother went to the sixth grade, for her the crown jewel."
The values were not abstract. Anderson had a saying he repeated so often it became a family refrain. Thomas quoted him directly: "Old man can't is dead. I helped bury him." Thomas added that "the old man can't was buried many times in our house."
That philosophy, do the work, skip the complaint, build capacity, shaped everything Thomas carried into adult life. He described his grandfather in terms that left no room for ambiguity:
"My grandfather, no education, raised by a freed slave, and he never complained. He did it. He was just a great man. Now what do you do? How do you complain when he had nothing, no education? What do you say to it? But he sets this example of how you live your life."
For a justice who has spent decades facing critics who question his identity and his right to hold the views he holds, the story of Myers Anderson is not sentimental filler. It is the foundation of a worldview his opponents have never bothered to understand.
The conversation with Robinson turned to economist Thomas Sowell, and Thomas drew a direct line between his grandfather's kitchen-table instruction and Sowell's scholarship. He said Sowell's book *Race and Economics* first caught his attention because it put rigorous argument behind what Anderson had drilled into him as a child.
Thomas explained the connection:
"I think it's something that Professor Sowell has been trying to stress, that a lot of the groundwork to being able to do difficult things, to achieve, are attitudes. And he talks about other groups. And that's what attracted me initially to 'Race and Economics,' because if you go back and you look at 'Race and Economics,' he talks about attitude of self-reliance, of self-discipline, etc., how important those were."
Then Thomas closed the loop. He said the message from Sowell was identical to the message from his grandfather, his grandmother, and the Catholic nuns who educated him as a boy.
"Where did I first hear that? I heard it from my grandfather, the single greatest man I've ever known, my grandmother, a saintly woman, my nuns. Same thing. It's the exact same thing."
That alignment, between a Black economist's academic work and a Black man's lived experience raising children with almost no formal schooling, is the part of Thomas's biography that his loudest critics consistently ignore. They treat his conservatism as borrowed or performed. Thomas treats it as inherited, tested, and proven across generations.
The emotional peak of the conversation came when Thomas described the moment both grandparents were gone. He did not offer a long story. He offered a single sentence that carried the weight of forty years:
"When both my grandparents died suddenly in 1983, the decision I made was to live the rest of my life as a memorial to theirs."
He then extended the same principle to Sowell, telling Robinson: "And the point I'm going to make is that is the way I feel about Professor Sowell." Robinson, recognizing the moment, responded simply: "All right. Watch this because I'm going to lighten the mood here."
Thomas's description of his upbringing carries a specific philosophy that runs against the grain of modern progressive orthodoxy on race and achievement. He framed his grandparents' approach not as overcoming systemic barriers through political action, but as building internal capacity regardless of external conditions.
"It wasn't taking the measure of what you don't have. It wasn't to complain about that, but to develop the capacity to do things that you needed to do in order to... improve your life."
That sentence is a summary of how Thomas has approached the law for more than three decades on the Supreme Court. Whether the issue is rebuking the Court for ducking hard cases or writing lone dissents that force the majority to confront constitutional text they would rather skip, Thomas operates from a fixed point. The fixed point is Savannah.
His critics have spent years trying to diminish him, questioning his credentials, his independence, even his right to speak as a Black man who rejects progressive assumptions. Rising tensions around the Court have made the personal attacks sharper and more frequent. Thomas has never adjusted his course in response.
He is not the only conservative justice who has drawn fire. Justice Alito has faced similar pressure and made clear he intends to stay. But Thomas's story is distinct because the attacks on him so often target the very identity his grandparents forged, and the very values they taught him to defend.
Even on the bench, Thomas has remained willing to stand alone. He has drawn sharp disagreement from fellow conservative justices when he believes the law demands it, a habit that tracks with the stubbornness Myers Anderson built into him as a boy.
A man with nine months of schooling, raised by a freed slave, who farmed a plantation and buried "old man can't" every time his grandsons hesitated, that is the man Clarence Thomas promised to memorialize with his life. Washington has spent decades trying to make him someone else. It hasn't worked.