The Justice

Media Credit: The Associated Press In 1991, Prof. Anita Hill (HELLER) testified before the U.S. Senate that Clarence Thomas, a nominee for Supreme Court Justice, had sexually harassed her. Since then, Hill has received 25,000 letters.

For 16 years, 25,000 letters sat in Prof. Anita Hill's (HELLER) basement, gathering dust and paying silent tribute to a time when details of Hill's private life were broadcast over most news channels.

In 1991, Hill spoke out against her former boss, Clarence Thomas, then a nominee for U.S. Supreme Court justice.

Despite Hill's accusations that Thomas had sexually harassed her while they worked together at the U.S. Department of Education and the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, he was appointed.

During the Senate hearings in which she testified against Thomas, Hill, now a professor of social policy, law and women's studies at the Heller School for Social Policy and Management, began receiving thousands of letters from people who'd heard about the hearings.

By 1992, Hill had received roughly 19,000 such letters.

Curious to find out how Americans had reacted to her decision to testify against Thomas, Hill initially read a certain portion of the letters she received each day.

"I gave myself a daily assignment to read so many letters ... in '91 and '92 just to see what was in them," Hill said.

Yet, despite her enthusiasm, Hill found it almost impossible to read the thousands of letters piling up in her mailbox.

She decided to wait until she was able to categorize the letters in an organized system before reading any further.

"I just got overwhelmed in terms of the numbers," she said.

In 1991, Bea Porter, a retired librarian, volunteered to help Hill develop a system of organizing the letters.

Porter divided the letters into categories, including "supportive, non-supportive, professional colleagues, personal friends and harassment stories," Hill wrote in an e-mail to the Justice.

Sixteen years later, confident that this organized system would make her task significantly easier, Hill pledged to read every letter she'd ever received in a single year.

Hill felt that she had a responsibility to read the letters.

Continued...

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