Thomas, then forty-three, was nominated by George H. W. Bush to succeed Thurgood Marshall on the court. The nomination wasn’t thrilling to progressives (who saw Thomas as an anti–affirmative action reactionary) or hard-right conservatives (who viewed his nomination as a kind of tokenism, since the only Black justice in history was being replaced by a candidate whose lone similarity was the color of his skin). Things got wild when the FBI interviewed University of Oklahoma law professor Anita Hill, a woman who had worked for Thomas during the early 1980s. Hill said Thomas had sexually harassed
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