Americans sat glued to their TV sets as Clarence Thomas, a nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court, responded to last-minute charges by an obscure law-school professor at the University of Oklahoma College of Law. With the hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee winding down, and Thomas’s confirmation seemingly secured, Professor Anita Hill had unleashed 11th-hour accusations against him, charging that Thomas had sexually harassed her while he was her supervisor at the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission during the Reagan administration. 

“I cannot imagine anything that I said or did to Anita Hill that could have been mistaken for sexual harassment.… I have not done what she has alleged, and still do not know what I could have possibly done to cause her to make these allegations,” Thomas told the committee.

The story of the battle over the confirmation of Clarence Thomas to the nation’s highest federal court really begins four years earlier, with a previous nominee, Robert Bork. 

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