For Clarence Thomas, Lynching Is Personal. Only.

As late as 1972, the summer after his first year at Yale Law School, Thomas and his first wife encountered a billboard that said "The United Klans of America Welcome You" when they crossed into North Carolina while driving from New Haven to Atlanta.

Thomas labeled his rage at the racism he'd endured "the beast." He admitted that he lost his battle with it in the summer of 1968, when it consumed him from within. "I couldn't accept the way the white man had treated [his beloved grandfather]. Somehow, some way, he and others like him had to be avenged."

But once the 1991 confirmation battle was behind him, Thomas revealed through his legal opinions a very different view of lynching's social legacy. In several cases challenging affirmative action programs, Thomas adamantly refused to consider the history of racial discrimination and violence as justifications for remedies designed to right discriminatory wrongs.

Last term, Thomas's concurring opinion in a hotly contested pair of school cases from Seattle and Jefferson County, Ky., provided the clearest window yet onto his views about whether the court should consider the heritage of racial violence.

Thomas sided with the conservative wing of the court, which ruled that using race as a criterion in assigning even a limited number of pupils was unconstitutional. Thomas disagreed with the moderates on the court, who sought to correct a pattern of "resegregation" in which more than one in six black children attends a school that is 99 to 100 percent minority.

A pivotal question in both school cases was what importance should be given to past racial discrimination, including the racial violence that laid the foundation for today's patterns of residential segregation. In his definitive study of racial violence in Kentucky from 1865 to 1940, the historian George Wright concluded that "no black person within Kentucky was immune from attacks by whites. . . .The entire legal system upheld white violence by refusing to apprehend, charge and convict white offenders of blacks." The violence in Kentucky could be seen in the "destruction of black schools and property, in forcing all blacks in certain areas to leave the community, in the denial to blacks of [a] right to fair trials, and [in] the cold-blooded murder of blacks, often at the hands of lynch mobs."

On the bench, Thomas dismissed the implications of this history of racial violence in Kentucky. But when it was to his advantage in his confirmation fight, he asked the nation to share his outrage at being treated like a lynching "victim" at the hands of a Senate Judiciary Committee stacked with white male "lynchers."

If the court had taken notice of past racial violence, it would have reached the opposite conclusion in the schools case.

In Thomas's worldview, the consequences of lynching appear to apply only to him personally. Lynching counts as a device in writing a dramatic autobiography, not as a factor in interpreting our laws. By Thomas's legal reasoning, the hundreds of thousands of minority children who attend racially resegregated schools have no connection to the nation's history of lynching and white race riots.

This history of violence has shaped the very boundaries of our neighborhoods and our chances of achieving the American dream. Residential segregation today provides the foundation for school resegregation and the attendant inequality of public schools. All this will limit the opportunities of hundreds of thousands of poor and minority children, still growing up in a world very much like the impoverished circumstances Thomas describes so vividly in "My Grandfather's Son."

I can only scratch my head at Thomas's blindness to the current impact of the history of real lynchings. Forgive my bewilderment when this convenient loss of vision comes from a "lynching victim" with so much power.

Emma Coleman Jordan is a professor of law at Georgetown University Law Center and author of the forthcoming "Blood at the Root: Lynching, Divided Memory, Race and Justice in American Law."