“David and Peggy Sokol hosted us in Montana for a ranch visit and tour of Yellowstone,” the Thomases stated within the letter, which was reviewed by The Times. The Thomases introduced alongside their canine, Petey, who performed with the Sokols’ canine, Bodie. They wrote: “Bodie showed Petey how to be a ranch dog, without a leash! LIBERTY!”

The journey, they concluded, was “pure heaven for all of us!”

Tasting the Good Life

The Clarence Thomas origin story begins in a dirt-floor shack in Pin Point, a tiny group based by previously enslaved folks within the salt marsh lands exterior Savannah.

When he’s 20, after a quick spell in a Roman Catholic seminary, it continues on the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass., the place he’s certainly one of a small group of younger Black males who combine the varsity. There, within the spring of 1971, his senior yr, he receives a letter from Yale Law School. He worries that the skinny envelope means a rejection. But one of many nation’s most elite regulation faculties desires him.

“My heart raced and my spirits lifted,” Justice Thomas wrote in his autobiography.

At Yale, he was certainly one of solely 12 Black college students in his regulation college class, admitted the yr the regulation college launched an affirmative motion plan. His white classmates seen him as a token, he felt — a perception within the corrosive results of affirmative motion that was solely deepened by his failure to win the regulation agency job he had dreamed of.

“I’d graduated from one of America’s top law schools, but racial preference had robbed my achievement of its true value,” he later wrote. Separately, he described leaving Yale as a brand new father, with a “swirling combination of frustration, of some disappointments, of some anxiety about the future, and some anxiety about how I would repay my student loans, how I would feed a young child, where I would live.”