Justice Thomas’s Declaration

As the Fourth of July approaches in this semiquincentennial year of the Declaration of Independence, the best commemorations will contain some element of civic education—a reflection on the words and deeds of the American Founding. In advance of celebrating what Frederick Douglass called “the first great fact” in our nation’s history, Justice Clarence Thomas delivered a civic cri de coeur at the University of Texas at Austin on the principles of the Declaration and the character necessary for maintaining the American way of life.

Exhibit A was the black American community in which he was raised. Identifying himself as “American by birth and Georgian by the grace of God,” Thomas showed his affection for a country where the black residents of Pin Point, Georgia, affirmed the nation’s “promised ideals” even as they experienced “the indelible mark of segregation and its companion evils.” Their moral fiber in the face of Georgia’s segregation laws and customs taught him his worth as a human being and his rights as an American. As Thomas put it, “At home, at school, and at Church, we were taught that we were inherently equal…. [T]hat you did not get your rights or your dignity from those governments, but from God.” That moral self-understanding, shaped by the ideals of the American Founding and a culture shaped by Christianity, was central to Thomas’s message about the Declaration of Independence.

The venue for Thomas’s civics lesson was UT’s new School of Civic Leadership (SCL), established, as he noted, to teach students about “Western civilization and the American constitutional tradition.” While applauding their efforts to “rejuvenate our fellow citizens’ commitment to the principles of the Declaration of Independence,” he pointed out that SCL’s mission was to offer civic education “as part of a larger quest for wisdom about how to live and how to lead.”

Where critics of these new civic centers view them as ideological silos, Thomas sees SCL as reclaiming the university’s mission as a truth-seeking institution. That means not just presenting answers—like the self-evident truths of the Declaration—but also having debates and arguments about them. “Indeed,” Thomas observed, “your School of Civic Leadership was created to host such arguments.” Foremost among the arguments against America’s Founding principles are those associated with the progressivism championed by Woodrow Wilson, which Thomas identified as bad for both America and the world.