WASHINGTON - Republicans everywhere should be grateful this week for Clarence Thomas. After the Trent Lott debacle erupted, somebody, and it turned out to be the quiet justice known for rocking silently in his chair, had to remind his party that this is the 21st century.
Lott, the Mississippi Republican and incoming Senate majority leader, has been reaping well-deserved political retribution from conservatives and liberals alike for his appalling remark at Strom Thurmond's 100th birthday party. Apparently in the excitement of having seized the lectern and juiced by the emotion of the revelers, Lott said that his state proudly voted for Strom Thurmond for president in 1948, a year when South Carolina's Thurmond, only now retiring as the longest-serving GOP senator, ran on a segregationist, racist platform. If Thurmond had been elected, Lott effusively pressed on, the country would be better off.
Lott last made that stunning statement in 1980, so it wasn't a spur-of-the-moment asininity. All over the country, people who haven't given Lott two minutes of thought, except to wonder how he gets his hair to behave so well, have started pondering whether there's anything under all those follicles.
For the record, Lott's exact words were: "I want to say this about my state. When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We're proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years, either."
Lott was far from impressive the first time he had the majority leader's job, before Vermont's Jim Jeffords bolted the party to become an independent. Republicans openly pined for the more effective Bob Dole, who resigned to run for president in 1996.
As Lott fought to keep his boss-of-the-Senate job, he went from sputtering that he was just saying nice things about an old friend to abject public apologies admitting what he said was "terrible." In a breathtaking but days-late rebuke, President Bush, eager to increase minority participation in the party, personally and publicly reprimanded Lott on Thursday.
So in this atmosphere up pops Thomas, who has never really erased the public's image of his messy confirmation hearings when a former employee, lawyer Anita Hill, accused him of sexual harassment. Neither has he ever gained the trust of many blacks, who see him as a Republican who forgot his roots as poor and black in a repressive society.
Thomas rarely questions lawyers during their Supreme Court appearances. He is not known for brilliant or independent opinions.
But last Wednesday, there was Thomas, the high court's only black member, passionately arguing that the Constitution's precious guarantee of free speech does not protect people who burn crosses.
Thomas' fellow justices sat riveted at hearing their nonloquacious colleague suggest that in this society, burning a cross is a threat and unlawful intimidation, not a First Amendment right of political self-expression.
In an unusually strong voice, Thomas thundered that 100 years of lynching must not be understated. "This was a reign of terror, and the cross was a sign of that." Unlike other symbols in U.S. society, he said, "There's no other purpose to the [burning] cross, no communication, no particular message. It was intended to cause fear and to terrorize a population."
This is a tough one. Cross-burners, who sprang from the infamous Ku Klux Klan, are invariably scum, and use cross-burnings as a symbol of their belief in white supremacy. But free speech is so vital to Americans that no right-thinking justice wants to tamper with it. Yet, Thomas might have persuaded a majority of the court to agree with him that upholding Virginia's law would not harm free speech because in this country, burning a cross has nothing to do with religion or speech but is as powerful a threat as waving a gun in someone's face.
One week. Two powerful reminders of the ugly power of racism.
In one week, because of that power, Lott, among the most visible of men, lost his credibility and the trust of millions, while Thomas, the invisible justice once scorned by many blacks as too ready to forget their struggles, gained both.
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