Anita Faye Hill (born July 30, 1956) is an American lawyer, educator and author. She is a professor of social policy, law, and women's studies at Brandeis University and a faculty member of the university's Heller School for Social Policy and Management. She became a national figure in 1991 when she accused U.S. Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas, her supervisor at the United States Department of Education and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, of sexual harassment. Early life and education Anita Hill was born to a family of farmers in Lone Tree, Oklahoma, the youngest of Albert and Erma Hill's 13 children. Her family came from Arkansas, where her maternal grandfather Henry Eliot and all of her great-grandparents had been born into slavery. Hill was raised in the Baptist faith. Hill graduated from Morris High School, Oklahoma in 1973, where she was class valedictorian. After high school, she enrolled at Oklahoma State University and received a bachelor's degree in psychology with honors in 1977. She studied at Yale Law School, obtaining her Juris Doctor degree with honors in 1980. Work as a lawyer She was admitted to the District of Columbia Bar in 1980 and began her law career as an associate with the Washington, D.C. firm of Wald, Harkrader & Ross. In 1981, she became an attorney-adviser to Clarence Thomas, who was then the Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights. When Thomas became chairman of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) in 1982, Hill served as his assistant, leaving the job in 1983. Work as a professor Hill then became an assistant professor at the Evangelical Christian O. W. Coburn School of Law at Oral Roberts University where she taught from 1983 to 1986. In 1986, she joined the faculty at the University of Oklahoma College of Law where she taught commercial law and contracts. In 1989, she became the first tenured African American professor at OU. She left the university in 1996 due to ongoing calls for her resignation that began after her 1992 testimony. In 1998, she became a visiting scholar at Brandeis University and, in 2015, a university professor at the school. Allegations of sexual harassment against Clarence Thomas In 1991, President George H. W. Bush nominated Clarence Thomas, a federal circuit judge, to succeed retiring Associate Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. Senate hearings on his confirmation were initially