Gov. Nathan Deal appointed Clyde Reese to the Court of Appeals of Georgia in 2016.

His court biography states that he was born in Florence, South Carolina, and moved to Atlanta with his parents in 1969 at age 10. He and two family members then integrated Pace Academy. He attended Georgia State University in Atlanta with a major in world history and a minor in economics, graduating in 1980. For the next 13 years, Reese worked in residential real estate, as his family operated Brown and Reese Realty, one of the first African American-owned residential brokerage firms in Atlanta.