(JOHN DURICKA/ASSOCIATED PRESS) - Anita Hill testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee on the nomination of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court on Oct. 11, 1991.
Twenty years ago, when Anita Hill returned home from the contentious Senate hearings during which she accused Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment, people told her not to worry — her name would be forgotten in a matter of months.
But two things have become clear this week as she has re-entered the debate: The raw tensions over race, gender and politics raised by the hearings have not been forgotten. And Anita Hill is acting like a woman who wants her name remembered.
She is stepping back into the news by choice, giving a series of interviews about a book she released this week on issues of gender and race called “Reimagining Equality.” And she is attending seminars focused on the anniversary of the Thomas hearings, having become over the years a minor political celebrity.
For many, Hill embodies the fight against sexual harassment and gender discrimination, even as she triggers vitriol from others who dismiss her testimony as a partisan attack against Thomas.
“The hearing had for me an unexpected consequence,” Hill said in an interview. “I just didn’t have any sense that it was going to resonate in the way that it did. It has been kind of difficult for me.”
While Thomas went on to the Supreme Court, where he has become a consistent conservative voice, Hill has led a relatively quiet life in Massachusetts. She teaches social policy, law and women’s studies at Brandeis University, delivers lectures on sexual harassment and now has written two books. The first book, “Speaking Truth to Power,” was published in 1998 and dealt with her experience during the hearings.
Now, she is likely to be returning to Washington often after joining the District-based law firm Cohen Milstein Sellers & Toll as an adviser to its civil rights and employment practice group. She also will soon become the special counsel to the provost at Brandeis.
The enduring tensions over the hearings became clear to Hill last October when she received a voice-mail message from Thomas’s wife, Virginia, requesting an apology for Hill’s testimony in those 1991 hearings. After Hill reported the call to her employers and it broke in the news, she received a slew of e-mails and phone calls from supporters and opponents.
“People are really still feeling this,” said Hill, who rejected the call for an apology, saying she initially thought the message was a prank. “That gut reaction [people felt] in 1991 still has not gone away.”
In October of that year, Hill was a 35-year-old lawyer who had worked for Thomas at the Education Department and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. As a key witness at his nomination hearings, she brought graphic accusations against him before a Senate panel, detailing lurid and harassing sexual statements, which Thomas vehemently denied. The controversy gripped the country.
The hearings also changed the trajectory of Hill’s life. The questioning by the Senate Judiciary Committee, then a panel of white men, was “hurtful,” she said, and she does not believe a white woman would have met the same reception. But she also said she does not regret her involvement.
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