In Summary
Milestone. America has gone through 82 State Attorneys, none of whom was Black. One woman has fortunately brought that era to an end
Loretta Lynch, an African American lawyer, is America’s 83rd Attorney General. She becomes the first African-American woman to hold the position. After a long delay, the US Senate finally accepted her nomination that had been put forward by President Barack Obama five months ago.
Aged 55, Lynch was born in Greensboro in the state of North Carolina on May 21. Her father, Lorenzo Lynch, was a Baptist minister, and her mother, Lorine, an English teacher and school Librarian. Lynch is the middle child of three children.
Proving her worth from way back
In her interview with Wall Street Journal, she says her father ran many times for public office but was always defeated. Still, those campaigns gave her an early introduction to politics.
She also recounts being asked to re-take a standardised test after she scored higher than administrators expected at the elementary school she attended, with mostly white students.
Lynch’s mother fought back, saying the score wouldn’t have been questioned if her daughter had been white. In the end, she redid the test but scored even higher.
Lynch also should have been her high school’s first African-American valedictorian (a student that ranks highest in academics and delivers the closing statement or speech on graduation), but after much agonising, the school administrators decided she had to share the honour with two other top-scoring students, one black, the other white.
“We were all friends,” she said, “and we all thought it was really dumb. But it became a huge deal.”
She graduated from Harvard University, where her idea of great fun as an English major was reading Chaucer who was a famous English poet in Old English. She then went on to study at Harvard Law School.
After graduation, she worked in corporate law in Manhattan. Big money was trumped by the chance to do something she thought meaningful.In 1990, she took a 75 per cent pay cut to join the Eastern District in the state of New York.
In 1998, after a series of promotions, she was named chief assistant to Zachary Carter, the then head of the office.
Career scores
Lynch worked within the U.S. Attorney’s office to help convict the New York Police Department officer who assaulted, brutalized and sodomized Haitian immigrant, Abner Louima, with a broom handle, in one of the highest-profile police brutality cases of the 1990s. Louima who is a black and the arrested officers were white, but Lynch said she didn’t want the case to become a referendum on race.
President Bill Clinton first appointed her to be a U.S. Attorney in 1999, and she served until 2001. She was appointed again by President Barack Obama in 2010. In between her terms, she was a partner at Hogan & Hartson, which has since been renamed Hogan Lowells, focusing on criminal litigation and white collar criminal defense.
When she returned to the US Attorney’s office for the second time in 2010, her office helped convict the masterminds of the thwarted al-Qaeda scheme to attack the New York subway system.
Earlier this year, Lynch charged Representative Michael Grimm, a Republican congressman from Staten Island, with perjury, wire fraud, obstruction of justice, and tax evasion for his dealings in a health-food restaurant he had operated before he ran for office.
Lynch’s lessons from a Rwanda visit
Lynch also found time for pro-bono work. In 2005, she traveled to Rwanda to teach a trial advocacy workshop for the prosecutors at the Rwandan war crimes tribunal, to help restore justice after the genocide.
“I listened to the genocide survivors as they told me how they were forced to hide under the dead to avoid capture, and watched as they showed me the machete scars they still carried,” she wrote in the Class Report. “But I learned the most as I saw how they carried on with life, reaching out to orphans to create new families, knitting together a future out of the scars of the past.”
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