Many speeches will be delivered this year about the Declaration of Independence as we celebrate its 250th birthday.

However, I think the greatest was just delivered by Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas on April 15 at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas, Austin.

The force of Thomas' words does not just result from his deep understanding of what the United States is about, and how the Declaration of Independence defines it.

The force flows from Thomas' personal reality. He has lived what the Declaration is about. His words are not just the product of thought and study, but of Thomas's entire life experience.

Thomas grew up poor in America's Jim Crow South.

But he says, "Despite the multiplicity of laws and customs that wreaked a bigotry, it was universally believed among those blacks with whom I lived and who had very little or no formal education, that in God's eyes and under our Constitution, we were equal."

"When you lived in a segregated world with palpable discrimination and the governments nearest to you enforced laws and customs that........

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