page_title: Tom C. Clark
section_title: Supreme Court Justice
hierarchical_section_title: Tom C. Clark / Supreme Court Justice
caption_attribution_description: English: Former Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, Tom C. Clark in the Oval Office in 1967.
context_page_description: Thomas Campbell Clark was an American lawyer who served as the 59th United States Attorney General from 1945 to 1949. He was an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1949 to 1967.
  Born in Dallas, Texas, Clark graduated from the University of Texas School of Law after serving in World War I. He practiced law in Dallas until 1937, when he accepted a position in the United States Department of Justice. After Harry S. Truman became President of the United States in 1945, he chose Clark as his Attorney General. In 1949, Truman successfully nominated Clark to fill the Supreme Court vacancy caused by the death of Associate Justice Frank Murphy, making Clark the first Supreme Court Justice from the state of Texas. Clark remained on the court until his retirement in 1967, and was succeeded by Thurgood Marshall. Clark retired so that his son, Ramsey Clark, could assume the position of Attorney General.
  Clark served on the Vinson Court and the Warren Court. He voted with the Court's majority in the several cases concerning racial segregation, including the landmark case of Brown v. Board of Education. He wrote the majority opinion in landmark Mapp v.
context_section_description: After playing an active role in the effort to reelect Truman in 1948, Clark made clear to the White House that he was planning to return to Texas and the practice of law. Following the sudden death of Supreme Court Justice Frank Murphy, however, Truman nominated Clark to fill the vacancy, partly to bolster the majority of Chief Justice Fred Vinson, a former cabinet colleague and friend of Clark who, since his 1946 appointment by Truman, had failed to unify the Court.  Numerous attacks from across the political spectrum were leveled at the nomination, including charges of "cronyism," a lack of judicial experience, and objections based in part on his work at the center of Truman's anti-communist agenda and, specifically, the Attorney General's List of Subversive Organizations.  Former Roosevelt cabinet members Henry Wallace and Harold Ickes also leveled broadsides, for both personal and ideological reasons.
  Ickes said about the nomination, "President Truman has not 'elevated' Tom C. Clark to the Supreme Court, he has degraded the Court."  The New York Times called Clark "a personal and political friend [of Truman's] with no judicial experience and few demonstrated qualifications."
  Clark declined to testify at the Judiciary Committee hearing on his nomination, stating that he "didn't think that a person who had been nominated to the Supreme Court should testify, [since] it jeopardized his future effectiveness on the Court, [and] that he would invariably testify to something that would plague him." He nonetheless was confirmed by the Senate with just eight dissenting votes.
  In the four years they served together on the Court, Clark voted with Vinson more than 85 percent of the time,  and helped provide him with a reliable majority, however, the Court as a whole remained fragmented. In 1953, Vinson died of a heart attack, and for the remainder of tenure on the Court, Clark served alongside Chief Justice Earl Warren, producing a mix of opinions that makes it difficult to characterize him as either conservative or liberal.
  In the area of civil rights, Clark backed decisions supporting government enforcement of laws designed to promote racial equality. To this end he authored or played a key supporting role in a number of the Court's landmark decisions in this area. Several rulings by the Vinson Court, most notably Sweatt v. Painter and McLaurin v. Oklahoma State Regents (1950), which held that black graduate students must be allowed into "white" state universities and law schools because the separate black school could not provide an education of equal quality, helped lay the groundwork for holdings including Brown v. Board of Education (1954). Clark played a critical behind-the-scenes role in Sweatt and McLaurin that shaped the discussion and provided a workable solution on this issue, helping to "move the Court from considering equality only as a measurable mathematical construct … to what would become known as intangibles." Clark's role as one of two southern justices gave him additional impact in those cases, as well as in Brown and Hernandez v. Texas (1954), in which the Court ruled that excluding persons of Mexican ancestry from juries violated the Constitution, and other decisions. He also authored a number of important decisions on race in the 1960s during the height of the Civil Rights era, including Anderson v. Martin (1964), which held unconstitutional a Louisiana statute because it required the races of those running for office to be printed on a ballot, Burton v. Wilmington Parking Authority, which upheld the concept of state action to find that a private restaurant violated the 14th Amendment's Equal Protection Clause, and Heart of Atlanta Motel v. United States and Katzenbach v. McClung, which upheld the public accommodations provision of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
  Clark also faced many cases addressing the constitutionality of Cold War era laws and questions of freedom of association involving loyalty oaths and other requirements in which individuals had to affirm that they were not members of particular groups 
caption: Clark in the Oval Office in 1967 after retiring from the Supreme Court.
exif: {}