The name Clarence Thomas should be on the lips of every African-American kid in school today. The celebration of his 25th anniversary on the Supreme Court should be all over the news. He should be featured prominently in the new National Museum of African American History and Culture on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.

But as Thomas, 68, marks a quarter-century on the court this week, none of those things are true. He is barely mentioned in schools. The media has all but ignored his tenure, except in glancing references. And he is not mentioned at all in the museum. “We cannot tell every story,” museum spokesperson Linda St. Thomas told CNS News.

“I had decided to vote for Ronald Reagan. It was a giant step for a black man, but I believed it was a logical one.”

It’ll be interesting to see how long it takes them to get around to telling Thomas’ story — but it is a story that absolutely deserves to be told.

He grew up in poverty in Pin Point, Georgia, near Savannah, and inherited a work ethic from his grandfather that enabled him to go to Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, and then to Yale Law School. He was appointed chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission by President Reagan in 1982, to the D.C. Court of Appeals by President George H.W. Bush in 1990, and to the Supreme Court in 1991.

After famously rocky hearings, Thomas was confirmed. He has now served longer than Thurgood Marshall, the man he replaced and the only other African-American ever to serve on the court.

He has received little media attention over the years. He’s known to almost never speak during oral arguments, and he spent most of his time on the court with Antonin Scalia, a powerful intellect with an outsized personality that dominated the room.

But attorneys who have followed Thomas’ career are impressed with the depth and breadth of his work.

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“His more than 500 written opinions [contribute] new and painstakingly researched analysis,” wrote Mark Paoletta, who served as White House counsel to President George H.W. Bush.

“If the measure of judicial accomplishment is the number and quality of opinions a justice writes — and not the questions he rattles off during oral arguments — then by that measure, Thomas is among the most impressive justices.”

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The reason Thomas’ story is so rarely and poorly told — the reason the African-American museum can’t put him among the first stories it tells — has nothing to do with the quality of his work. It has everything to do with the way he has led his life.

It all started in 1980, when Thomas decided to vote for Ronald Reagan. Not many African-American men took this step. But Thomas saw the destruction that Democratic Party policies had caused in his community — and he wanted to find another way.

“I had decided to vote for Ronald Reagan. It was a giant step for a black man, but I believed it was a logical one,” Thomas wrote in his book, “My Grandfather’s Son.”

“I saw no good coming from an ever-larger government that meddled, with incompetence if not mendacity, in the lives of its citizens, and I was particularly distressed by the Democratic Party’s ceaseless promises to legislate the problems of blacks out of existence.”

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“Their misguided efforts had already done great harm to my people, and I felt sure that anything else they did would compound the damage,” he wrote. “Reagan, by contrast, was promising to get government off our backs and out of our lives, putting an end to the social engineering of the ’60s and ’70s.”

African-Americans were better off, he said, when “left alone instead of being used as guinea pigs for the foolish schemes of dream-killing politicians.”

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And that put him on the wrong side of those who write glowing magazine profiles and decide whose story to tell first at the African-American museum.

Petitions have been launched to feature Thomas in the museum, but there is little chance the museum will change course. Yes, he contributed, the curators say. But on the “wrong” side.

“His absence from the new African-American museum is an insult to all blacks and a testament to the small-mindedness of the American Left,” Joe diGenova, former U.S. attorney to the District of Columbia, told LifeZette. “As in every instance where he has been confronted by bigotry, he has won the day by his dignity and quiet confidence in himself and his views.”

“He has brought to the court a quiet dignity.”

“There is no love for diversity of thought on the American Left, and they are bereft of any overarching philosophy other than insult, personal attack, power, personal destruction, and intolerance.  How ironic that a museum dedicated to the African-American experience in America ends up being so intellectually barren and prejudiced.”

So, no — there hasn’t been and won’t be much fanfare to commemorate Justice Thomas’ quarter-century on the high court. But court watchers know he has been a powerful and thoughtful advocate for constitutional originalism and limits on the power of government. He is a quiet but essential voice, urging our nation back onto the right path.

“He has brought to the court a quiet dignity,” diGenova said. “His writing has been superb. He has staked out truly classical conservative constitutional positions and espoused them with vigor and confidence.”

Thomas himself spoke this week at The Heritage Foundation, commenting that Washington “is broken in some ways.” It was a reference to the politicization of the judicial nomination process, although he didn’t directly address the open spot left on the court after the death of Justice Antonin Scalia in February. But when asked about the open seat, he replied, “At some point, we have got to recognize that we’re destroying our institutions,” according to a Bloomberg report.