Corn Fields and Supreme Court Judges

While the debate about whether or not Clarence Thomas would succeed Thurgood Marshall Jr. to the Supreme Court raged across the country a group of friends and I were traveling from corn field to corn field in Eastern Iowa working as summer labor for my father who at the time was a labor contractor bringing workers from the Rio Grande Valley in southern Texas to hire them out to local farmers.

We worked from sun up to sun down, through heat and flash thunderstorms, but the money to be made from detasseling corn was to good to be passed up. We walked rows of corn, some a mile long. Since we were being paid by the acre the faster we worked the more we were paid. Every field we arrived at the first thing we ask was how many rows made an acre. The longest was four. Four rows made one acre. That was a lot of corn.

All of us were undergraduates at the time and out there in the corn fields of Iowa we were feeling a little cut off from the greater world around us. My father had a broken down old television with rabbit ears that didn't work and for some reason the only paper available in Columbus Junction was the local weekly. In the mornings we would tune in the Public Radio station out of Iowa City on the way to the wet dewy cornfields. Those early mornings we would listen intently to the confirmation hearings on the radio. We would listen and jeer at the radio as the liberal commentators talked about Clarence Thomas' opposition to affirmative action. His solid conservative credentials. We listened as he was charged with sexual harassment by not one, two but three different women.

We spent the week talking, ranting about how this white man who was against Affirmative Action, who openly harrassed women at their jobs how could this man be chosen to replace one of the fiercest legal minds of our time. Even as young men just coming to understand the world it was a shock to us. So there we were driving down this dusty dirt road in the middle of Louisa County Iowa on our way to the next fields listening the confirmation hearings when we heard the statment that would change dramatically the way we saw things:

"and his wife is white"

Tony Spangler (we were riding in his 1988 mercury lynx) slams on the brakes. The five of us get out of the car stopped in the middle of that dusty dirt road and looked at each other with concern.

"Why would they say something like that."

The realization hit us all at the same time. Clarence Thomas was Black. We stared at each other for a minute or so and then got back in the car. I said "How can he be Black?"

"There are Black devils as well white" said Fred Guy. Basically summing up the political reality of the next two decades.

Thomas went on to be appointed to the Supreme Court where he has done is utmost to fulfill a conservative agenda. That was the last summer most of us spent a significant amount of time together but that one moment is burned into my mind. A time of political innocence coming to an end the day I found out Clarence Thomas is Black.