Eric Holder wont leave quietly.
Two months after he resigned, the first African-American attorney-general in U.S. history remains viscerally engaged in the wrenching, sometimes violent racial fault lines that cleave the nation.
Mr. Holder, 63, has thrown the weight of the federal Justice Department into unfinished civil-rights efforts as the United States reels again from the deaths of unarmed African-Americans at the hands of white police officers and from the recent decisions by grand juries in Ferguson, Mo., and New York City not to indict the policemen responsible. Mr. Holder has ordered investigations that could lead to civil-rights prosecutions.
For Mr. Holder, and for millions of black Americans, a deep-seated belief remains that systemic injustice afflicts poorer, urban and thus mostly black neighbourhoods. As simmering rage boiled over, Mr. Holder put himself squarely in the spotlight, just as he did last summer when he went to Ferguson, and has pledged Justice Department involvement in ongoing investigations as well as a broader effort to deal with the underlying sense of injustice.
Ive seen the criminal justice system firsthand, from nearly every angle, Mr. Holder told the American Bar Association last year. We must face the reality that, as it stands, our system is in too many respects broken a vicious cycle of poverty, criminality, and incarceration traps too many Americans and weakens too many communities.
As the latest angry protests filled streets in New York and Washington, Mr. Holder this week announced the grim results from a two-year federal investigation that found a pattern and practice of using excessive force by Clevelands police force and promised probes into other forces. Only days earlier and not included in the probe of hundreds of violent police-civilian encounters a 12-year-old black child waving a toy gun was shot and killed by a police officer who fired less than two seconds after his police car slid to a stop in the grassy playground.
Mr. Holder makes no secret of the fact he wants to be remembered as an activist attorney general.
When he quit, Ethel Kennedy, widow of Robert F. Kennedy, the 1960s attorney-general who drove some of the most far-reaching civil-rights reforms before he was assassinated, posted a tribute on his page on the Justice Department website. So did Myrlie Evers, widow of the slain civil-rights leader Medgar Evers, gunned down by a white supremacist. There has been no greater ally in the fight for justice, civil rights, equal rights, and voting rights, Mrs. Evers wrote, a view widely shared among African-Americans.
But while he championed sweeping changes in law enforcement and sentencing,he also has been accused of trampling on civil liberties and defying Congress during a tempestuous six years as Mr. Obamas closest friend and ally in the Cabinet. (He announced he was stepping down in September but would remain at Justice until a successor was confirmed. Given the hostility in the soon-to-be Republican-majority Senate, that could be months.)
It was Mr. Holder who signed off on the secret surveillance of hundreds of millions of phone and e-mail records, provided the justification so Mr. Obama could claim that he had a legal right to target selected U.S. citizens for execution overseas by missile-firing dronesbacked FBI tracking of private cars without warrants, and subpoenaed journalists to force them to reveal sources. Critics note that, on Mr. Holders watch, not a single Wall Street prosecution followed the financial meltdown.
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Police duty in the eyes of Eric Holder