Born: 21 May 1959, United States
Died: NA
Country most active: United States
Also known as: NA
The following is excerpted from Infinite Women founder Allison Tyra’s book The View from the Hill: Women Who Made Their Mark After 40.
Loretta Lynch was a successful attorney long before she turned 40, but her most impactful work was arguably what came later. Lynch’s father has been active in the civil rights movement and her grandfather had helped African Americans escape punishment during the time of Jim Crow laws. So it’s little surprise that Lynch, born in 1959, would grow up to become a U.S. attorney working for the federal government. She was first appointed to this role in 1999, returning to private practice in 2002. Even then, she served as special counselor to the prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. She would later be re-appointed as U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York in 2010 by President Barack Obama. In 2014, he nominated her as U.S. attorney general, heading the entire federal Department of Justice. Despite a contentious confirmation process in the U.S. Senate, she took office in 2015 as the first African American woman to hold the position.
As attorney general, Lynch prioritized police reform in the wake of high-profile instances of police brutality. The resulting report was scathing and the city of Baltimore in particular agreed to implement several changes recommended by the DOJ. She also announced the DOJ would take the state of North Carolina—Lynch’s own home state, incidentally—to court over a controversial law forcing transgender people to use restrooms, locker rooms, and other facilities that aligned with the sex they were assigned at birth. This not only endangered an already at-risk, marginalized population—it violated their civil rights, but this was part of a larger battle that would ultimately extend long past Lynch’s tenure. She left office in January 2017, at the conclusion of Obama’s presidency.