I was talking about his earlier days before being in the court, where he was inspired by Malcom X and the Black Panthers, though he seemed more interested in the hard militarized image of them:

inspired by the Black Panthers.”

“He dressed like them. He talked like them. He had a beret. He had Army fatigues and he had the Army boots,” Gordon Davis, a former classmate, recalls in the above clip.

Thomas had a poster of Malcolm X in his dorm room. He reportedly boasted that he had read all of the activist’s speeches and, at one time, could have quoted some of them by heart. Thomas was not alone in his frustration with racial injustice at the time.

“I had evolved from being hopeful to being pissed off. A lot of young people in America was pissed off,” Orion Douglass, another of Thomas’ former classmates, says in the clip. “And they weren’t seeking a reconciliation, okay? They were seeking a coup, to change the whole thing.”

Edit but you’re probably right that he never worked toward it. I kinda recall him being a lawyer for a while and thought he may have back then, but I could be remembering wrong.