Anita Hill

Anita Hill is an American lawyer, educator and author who is a professor of social policy, law and women's studies at Brandeis University. Born in 1956 in Lone Tree, Oklahoma, the youngest of thirteen children of a farming family, she took a bachelor's degree in psychology at Oklahoma State University and a Juris Doctor at Yale Law School in 1980. She was admitted to the District of Columbia Bar that year, worked as an associate at a Washington firm, and then served as an attorney-adviser and assistant to Clarence Thomas at the Department of Education and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. She taught at the O. W. Coburn School of Law at Oral Roberts University from 1983 and from 1986 at the University of Oklahoma College of Law, teaching commercial law and contracts, and in 1989 became the first tenured African American professor there. She became a national figure in 1991 when she testified in the Senate confirmation hearings for Thomas, then a nominee to the Supreme Court, that he had sexually harassed her. She joined Brandeis as a visiting scholar in 1998.