In July 1991, President George H.W. Bush nominated Clarence Thomas, a conservative African American judge for the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., to replace Justice Thurgood Marshall on the Supreme Court. While his confirmation hearings were ongoing, a former aide of Thomas’s named Anita Hill publicly accused him of sexual harassment during the time they had worked together in the 1980s. Hill claimed that Thomas had repeatedly made sexually crude and offensive comments to her and about her, calling into question Thomas’s judgment and fitness to be a Supreme Court justice.