Childfree & Childless Black History: Loretta Lynch
If you think Black History Month is all about Harriet Tubman and Roots and southern police turning fire hoses and dogs loose on black folks trying to vote as guaranteed them in the US Constitution, you fail to understand how history really works. The definition may be "knowledge of past events", but past events are in the eye of the beholder.
Today's events become tomorrow's history.
The name "Loretta Lynch" may ring a bell because of her controversial meeting with former President Bill Clinton on an airport tarmac during Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign. In October 2017, she met with the Intelligence Committee of the US House of Representatives that is probing Russian interference in the 2016 election.
Historic, certainly. But Loretta Lynch went into the history books the second that President Barack Obama appointed her io be America's top lawyer in 2014. After a long delay, in April 2015 she was confirmed and sworn in, becoming the the second African-American, the second woman, and the first African-American woman to be confirmed US attorney general.
She was born in Greensboro, North Carolina in 1959 to a family directly involved in the Civil Rights Movement. Ms. Lynch earned her bachelor's degree from Harvard College and a graduate degree from Harvard Law School.
Ms. Lynch first attracted national attention while working as a litigator for a private law firm before becoming a prosecutor for the U.S. Attorney's office in New York's Eastern District,where she was senior prosecutor for the infamous 1997 Abner Louima police-brutality case. (You remember that one: A Haitian immigrant was sodomized with a broomstick by NYC police in a Brooklyn precinct.)
In 1999, Ms. Lynch was appointed U.S. attorney for New York's Eastern District by President Bill Clinton and again by President Obama.
In 2007, Ms. Lynch married Stephen Hargrove, a former on-air technician at Showtime. She was 48 years old at the time. (Her husband has two adult children from a previous marriage.)
