Speaking Truth to Power

by Anita Hill

  My neighbors Dewey and Katherine Selmon and Wilma and John McFarland brought over casseroles; friends called to offer their assistance and comfort; my mother came to stay with me and help me deal with the stress and turmoil; and on the weekends JoAnn would come with her two younger children to assist and to divert my attention from the fracas. Jonna and Jerry, my niece and nephew, were always a distraction.

  One evening, as we were sitting down to dinner, David Swank came by the house. He asked to speak to me alone. “Campus police have received a call—a bomb threat,” he warned. “They are taking it seriously. Just to be on the safe side,” he advised, “you may want to go to a hotel for the night.” I went to my mother and sister and suggested that they spend the night in a local hotel. When I told them why, they insisted, “We’ll stay here with you.” Though I would have felt better had they left, I knew that I could not begin to run from the threats. This was one more test of my will but not one that I would choose for either of them or the children. True to their nature, they stood with me. Each of us prayed for safety that night. Thankfully, there was no bomb. I could never have forgiven myself if anything had happened to my family that night.

  One of the first salvos in Oklahoma came on the day I returned. The same woman who, in September, had claimed I collided with her car now telephoned a local television station to complain that I had been involved in a hit-and-run accident with her. She left the impression that I had crashed into her vehicle and fled the scene in a speedy getaway. She neglected to tell the reporter that I had given her my insurance information or that she had failed to follow up with my agent by setting an appointment for a damage assessment. According to the police, there was no basis for her claim. Louise Hilsen’s presence on that day was invaluable. She and Shirley Wiegand took the inquiries from the television station, answered what they could, and referred them to my insurance agent. The story did not run. But knowing that this woman had motives other than the truth, I took my car to the insurance claims adjuster, whose inspection indicated that no such collision had occurred. Nevertheless, in the weeks to come, the Washington Times newspaper would carry an editorial chiding me for irresponsibility in the situation. Clearly, every aspect of my life was going to be manipulated to serve political and economic gain.

  Physically exhausted and nerves frayed from lack of sleep, I returned to work on Tuesday, October 15, 1991. Reporters filled the halls seemingly occupying every vacant space. In an effort to stem the requests, I agreed to a few interviews that, with a few exceptions, the Los Angeles Times’ Roberto Suro interview being one, seemed particulary off the point. The pressure was bent on discovering a political plot. One reporter from The Washington Post was determined to discover when I had developed my sense of “racial awareness”—when, in Senator Heflin’s words, I developed my “militant attitude about civil rights”—as if that held the key to understanding my role in their imagined scheme. Mostly, the interviewers asked the same question, albeit sometimes phrased differently: Why didn’t you simply remain quiet? In the more trying times, I asked myself the same question.

  My students could not wait for the press to leave the school, and they expected me to be in class once the hearing had concluded. The time I spent preparing and teaching my classes allowed me to escape the events that had led to national and international attention. But unfortunately, in the classroom, the press presence and the hearing itself led to friction. My relationship with my first-year contract class was disrupted. And despite my best efforts through the fall and spring semesters, the relationship remained strained. The students in the upper divisions who were taking my commerical law class made the most of a difficult time for us all. More mature than the first-year students, they pulled together despite the disruption. They continued to study and work hard on their assignments and were focused even when I was distracted. As a teacher, one hopes to be an inspiration to students. During the fall of 1991 the group of second- and third-year students in my commercial law course were my inspiration.

  Some students even volunteered to be my unofficial security guards. This effort was organized by Butch Carol, a bodybuilder, who enlisted others from his weight-lifting group “to help out.” Friends remarked about how impressive my security looked. And, as photographs of me surrounded by tough-looking, muscular men appeared around the country, some in the press reported that they were professionals. We all chuckled over that; Butch and his recruits were some of the shyest and gentlest people at the school.

  Pain from my tumors increased with the stress of the other discomforts in my life. Yet I was in no physical or emotional condition to face the surgery necessary to relieve it. I postponed the operation which had been scheduled for the Thanksgiving holiday period. I could not face the physical trauma, or the prospect that the growths might be malignant. Once classes were completed, just before Christmas, I would. For the time being, however, the upheaval in my life which had begun immediately after the press leak continued at the same pace.

  The week of my return, Eric had minor surgery, the first in his life. Complications from the procedure landed him bleeding and in intense pain in the Norman Regional Hospital emergency room in the middle of the night. I could only pace the floor in the waiting room in response.

  Prior to my testimony, University Media Services had coaxed me into appearing in a promotional video for the university. On Friday a member of the press informed me that the university’s president, Richard Van Horn, had withdrawn the video that was to be aired during the upcoming football game. Later the video would run without my brief and rather innocuous appearance. When I learned that the clip had been pulled, I was hurt. This editing was a shunning—a clear effort at disassociation by an institution of which, prior to my testimony, I had been such an integral part that I was asked to appear in the piece. And as I was working in the provost’s office on the same floor of the same building as the president’s office, the fact that I learned of the president’s decision from the press rather than from the university added insult to the injury. It was a thoughtless slight. Perhaps not a deliberate one, but one that nevertheless added to the burden imposed by every other. The university office of media services sent the following explanation to the dean’s assistant:

  We have replaced the footage and voice of Professor Hill with new information strictly as an attempt to make sure our institutional message on undergraduate education is clearly understood and not overshadowed by the visibility of Professor Hill as a result of her media exposure nationwide. In other words, Professor Hill’s appearance on the tape would have changed the focus of the spot and diffused the institutional message.… Professor Hill is one our best and brighest and articulate faculty members, and we may use her in a spot later this year.

  I supposed that some explanation for removing me from a university promotional tape was better than none. I assumed that I had been solicited to do the spot for the reasons spelled out in the last sentence of the explanation. Yet I knew that the university acted not simply because of the fact of media exposure, but because of content of the exposure. Explanation aside, there as no excuse for the failure of the public affairs office to communicate the decision to me directly. This simple act was the harbinger of a general distancing from me by some in the administration—of making me precisely the outsider the senators had portrayed.

  I had been home for less than a week when a crank from Seaside, California, reported that I had sworn to him in August that Thomas had not harassed me. Norman Spaulding’s slanderous report appeared in a newspaper which he published and edited. Of all the allegations that were to appear about me, this story was the most preposterous. I have never been to Seaside and never gave an interview to anyone named Norman Spaulding. Had it not been so blatantly false and exploitative, it might have been almost funny. Spaulding claimed that I appeared in the Seaside City Council meeting on August 1 or 15 wearing a hot-pink suit and two-inch hot-pink heels. Though no record of any introduction appears on the audiotape of the
meetings and everyone on the council denied it took place, Spaulding alleged that I was introduced to the City Council. Following the meeting, he claimed, he interviewed me for thirty minutes and gave me tips on how to fabricate a better sexual harassment claim. But however laughable it all was, Paul Harvey reported it on his nationally syndicated radio program, and the Washington Times ran a story on it in the newspaper’s A section. Norman Spaulding had no doubt achieved his goal, with the participation of the national media, and no one seemed concerned about the cost to me.

  Almost immediately upon my return home, the Daily Oklahoman, Oklahoma City’s only daily newspaper, began running editorials on the hearing. They generally proclaimed that Clarence Thomas should be confirmed and that his opposition had invented the testimony. Editorializing was not limited to the editorial pages, as the news reports portrayed me as a party to a conspiracy against Thomas. The newspaper has made clear its position on the issue. But what the Oklahoman has never made clear to its readers is that the editorial page is controlled by an individual who helped to launch Clarence Thomas’ career as a judge.

  Patrick McGuigan, before taking the position at the Oklahoman, was a Washington, D.C., operative during the Reagan and Bush administrations. McGuigan liked Thomas because of their shared anti-affirmative action sentiments. Influential with the Bush administration, McGuigan reportedly called in a favor in getting Thomas appointed to the District of Columbia Circuit Court, putting Thomas in a position to move on to the Supreme Court upon the retirement of Justice Marshall. This clear apparent conflict of interest has not caused the newspaper to relieve McGuigan of his responsibilities on this issue. Yet McGuigan has made it clear that he will not be persuaded against his promotion of Clarence Thomas by the truth of my testimony or anyone else’s. His recurring diatribes are repulsive, but are a reality with which I have learned to live—like the obscene letters and telephone calls I continue to receive.

  Little of what happened to me during the week after my testimony made sense. Now there was no time to ponder my new circumstance as people stopped on the street to stare at me or pointed and whispered “Look, it’s her,” no more than four feet away from me. Some thoughtless cad posted my telephone number on an electronic bulletin board, effectively multiplying the prank calls. Total strangers who wrote or called or accosted me to condemn me to hell for real or imagined views which they attributed to me were now an integral part of what had once been a very private existence.

  But accepting the hard fact that I had become a symbol of an issue and had thus lost something of my right to privacy was not enough. I had to accept being treated by people as less than human. I had become the female counterpart of Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man.” I was obvious, but my humanity was not—like a figure in a wax museum to be admired, poked, glazed at, and photographed. Or insulted. Once a young couple in front of me at a counter began to speak about me in intentionally audible whispered tones. “Yes, that is her,” he said. “Well, I just know she lied,” she responded. “Look at her. I can’t believe she has the nerve to be seen in public,” she said. Finally, exasperated, I remarked that it was rude of them to “whisper” right in front of me. In a bizarre response, he referred to his friend: “We were just talking about the time she was raped.” I retreated, realizing that anyone with so little sensitivity as to personalize rape and speak of it so glibly would have no qualms about offending me or anyone else.

  Another time while I was shopping for paper towels, a woman came up to me and said, “You’re Anita Hill, aren’t you?” When I answered yes, she said, “I want to give you a big hug.” In the next motion, without any further warning, she embraced me. I was so taken aback by the idea of a stranger hugging me in the middle of Target that I left the cart there and headed for the parking lot. What I had not yet grasped was the way that my testimony had touched so many women emotionally that they wanted to respond by touching me physically.

  I was not used to such displays from strangers. I was hardly used to it from friends. Perhaps, if all of the reactions had been the same, I might have adjusted to it, but they varied jarringly from experience to experience. Some frightened me. Some shocked me. Some angered me. Some even amused me. Many made me want to withdraw; others made me want to strike back. But I was determined that none of them keep me from continuing with my life, and I adjusted by learning not to react to become the inanimate that others ascribed to me, not because I had changed, but, in Ellison’s words, “because of a peculiar disposition of the eyes of those with whom I came in contact.”

  PART THREE

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  On the morning of October 15, 1991, the news from Washington was that Clarence Thomas had enough votes to be confirmed as an associate justice of the Supreme Court. His seat on the Court was assured despite West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd’s impassioned plea on the Senate floor against the nomination and announcement of withdrawal of the support from four senators who had initially been counted as yes votes. The remaining yes pledges, including those of Democrats Alan Dixon of Illinois, Chuck Robb of Virginia, Richard Shelby of Alabama, and David Boren of Oklahoma, still outnumbered the nos.

  Busy at school, I tried not to think too much of the count and assumed the nomination’s success. But the press members who returned with me to Norman after the hearing were a constant reminder. “Do you have a comment?” they asked, as if talking to a politician who was about to watch a vote on a piece of legislation she had sponsored, rather than the individual whose story was being judged. So skewed was their perspective that I had nothing I wished to share with them. I asked Ovetta Vermillion, who had the uneviable task of fielding their requests throughout the day, to tell them that no comment would be forthcoming.

  The more persistent were not satisfied and followed me as I left the law school for home once again, camping across the street in a neighbor’s yard. Once inside my house, I would pull the shades and try to block out what was happening across the street. I would not allow the invasiveness of television cameras into my home. But no curtains could close out the clamor that the scene in my neighbor’s yard represented. For it was everywhere, inside my head and out. No matter how hard I tried “not to think about it,” my power of concentration met its match, and, like millions of others around the country, my mind focused on the vote. The major television networks carried the vote live and my colleagues in the law school watched the televised proceedings from the atrium on the second floor. My mother, Eric, and I sat in my den in front of the television, watching for the inevitable—at worst, my final humiliation; at best, no more than I had expected all along.

  The tension and nervousness of the senators showed through the veneer of the count’s formality. The networks carried the vote almost as if it were a sporting event. For added drama, one broadcaster carried a live videotape of Clarence Thomas’ mother watching the proceeding from her home in Pin Point, Georgia. When it was completed, Clarence Thomas succeeded Thurgood Marshall as associate justice of the Supreme Court, by a 52–48 vote, the narrowest margin of any Supreme Court nominee in history. The four-vote margin was much slimmer than what had been projected early on, though to the three of us it seemed like a resounding victory.

  Out of kindness or perhaps their own hurt, Eric and my mother sat speechless, staring at the proceedings. Not wanting to say anything that might intensify or invalidate my reaction, they awaited my response. “Well, that’s that,” I remarked, the first to break the silence. Though the words lacked profundity or insight into my feelings, they served the purpose of allowing us all to exhale simultaneously. Ironically, my usually circumspect mother was the first to voice her emotion. “The dirty rascals,” she declared of the Senate. A pained and angry Eric remained silent. I tried to maintain my dignity, resisting any sort of outburst that would only make matters more painful than the whole episode had already been. “It’s okay,” my mother said, trying to console me. “You did the right thing.” She was her usual self—short of words and to th
e point. I realized that both Eric and I were products of a guarded way of dealing with life’s disappointments that had been passed from her to us, just as it had probably been passed from her parents to her.

  Immediately after the vote, President Bush pronounced Thomas a “wonderful inspiration” and congratulated him for a job “well done.” Meanwhile, Thomas’ mother, Leola Williams, admonished me to pray about what I had done. She could never know how much I had prayed all along and would continue to pray. Oddly, I connected with her. Like my own parents, she, too, had become a part of the media spectacle.

  A cadre of reporters, the persistent ones who followed me home, now gathered at my front door. I answered the doorbell knowing that ignoring them would only lead to baseless speculation or worse intrusions by the less responsible members of the group. “How do you feel about the vote?” a reporter asked. The question was inane, and I could not even begin to articulate an answer. How I “felt about the vote” got jumbled together with a myriad of feelings I had about the leak, the hearing, the process, and the people on my step. I could assign any one of many emotions to the vote—disappointment, hurt, outrage, hope, embarrassment, disillusionment. A clever sound bite would have been in order, but I had no handler or spinmeister to prepare me. The way of modern journalism, reducing persons to icons, appeared at that moment to have lost its skill for dealing with mere human beings. My mother and Eric were not public relations experts, and there was no one else there or behind the scenes who was. I managed a brief statement composed as I stood there in front of them. I was “disappointed but not surprised” at the vote. Having one week earlier shared a wholly humiliating experience on national television out of responsibility to the judiciary confirmation process, I now wanted to keep private any humiliation and resentment out of responsibility to myself and my family.