SHE'LL GO DOWN IN
HISTORY
Loretta Lynch waited longer than the seven most recent U.S. attorneys general combined for a vote on the Senate floor. President Obama called the agonizing wait an “embarrassment” to the country.
But in the end, it didn’t matter. On April 27, Lynch was sworn in as the first African-American woman to serve as U.S. Attorney General, ending the tenure of Eric Holder, the country’s first black male to serve as Attorney General.
She grew up in Durham, North Carolina, the middle child of three, the daughter of a fourth-generation Baptist minister and a school librarian. Surrounded by the Civil Rights Movement as a child, Lynch told the Senate Judiciary panel in January that she has memories of riding on her father’s shoulders to his church, a meeting place for students organizing anti-segregation boycotts in the early 1960s.
Her fascination with law stems from watching hours of court proceedings with her father in Durham and hearing stories from her grandfather, a pastor who created his own version of the Underground Railroad in the 1930s. With thousands of African-Americans attempting to escape retribution from Jim Crow laws of the time period, he helped move Southern blacks to the North by hiding them in his home.
Lynch has said that through these stories, she “realized the power the law had over your life and how important it was that the people who wield that power look at each situation with a sense of fairness and evenhandedness.”
After graduating from Harvard College and Harvard Law School, Lynch at first worked for a private firm before joining the Eastern District of New York as a drug and violent-crime prosecutor in 1990. In serving two terms as the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District under Presidents Clinton and Obama, Lynch tackled cases surrounding terrorism and political corruption, most publicly indicting at least five Democratic current or former members of the New York state Legislature on corruption-related charges. Four of the politicians pleaded guilty or were convicted, while the fifth, New York State Senate leader John Sampson, has denied charges against him and was re-elected to office last November.
Perhaps her most high-profile case came during her first term as U.S. Attorney with the police brutality case brought by Haitian immigrant Abner Louima. Louima accused New York police officers of assaulting, brutalizing and sodomizing him with a broken-off broom handle after he was arrested outside a Brooklyn nightclub in 1997. The officer primarily involved with the attack, Justin Volpe, eventually confessed to sodomizing Louima and was sentenced to 30 years in prison without the possibility of parole.
It’s only fitting, then, that on her first day in office, Lynch was faced with protests in Baltimore surrounding the mysterious death of Freddie Gray, caused by injuries suffered while in police custody. As the country takes on controversial topics surrounding race and its role in society, Lynch is the woman who will lead the Justice Department’s response to the issues of our time. I, for one, cannot think of anyone more prepared and more willing to do just that.