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U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, shown speaking at the Congressional Black Caucus legislative conference on Friday, will be stepping down from his position as soon as a replacement is appointed. T.J. Kirkpatrick/Getty Images hide caption

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, shown speaking at the Congressional Black Caucus legislative conference on Friday, will be stepping down from his position as soon as a replacement is appointed.

A day after Attorney General Eric Holder announced his resignation, he made a long-planned visit to Scranton, Penn.

That's where he won his first big trial as a young public corruption prosecutor nearly 40 years ago. And he says coming to this federal courthouse now, returning to the site of his earliest legal success, makes sense.

"This, for me, was ... almost like completing a circle," he says. "I came here as a young and inexperienced trial lawyer and I came back as the head of the agency that I had just joined back in 1978."

After those early years, Holder reached nearly every goal he set for himself. He became the U.S. attorney in Washington, D.C., and then the deputy attorney general in the Clinton administration. Finally, in February 2009, he became the first African-American attorney general.

The job, he says, is the best he'll ever have one that shaped him as a lawyer and a person.

All that ran through his mind, Holder says, when he stood next to President Obama Thursday afternoon at the ceremony that announced his resignation.

"All of that was coming together, and made yesterday very emotional," he says. "It made me very concerned I was not going to be able to get through my remarks."

During that announcement, Holder looked down and bit his lip when Obama referenced his late father, an immigrant who raised the family in a modest home in Elmhurst, Queens.

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With The End In Sight, Holder Reflects On His Legacy

The attorney general has worked to include LGBT rights and other issues under the definition.

Pablo Martinez Monsivais/Reuters

Americans are so accustomed to speaking about civil rights as an historical eraMartin and Malcolm, Selma and Montgomery, Jim Crow and segregated fountainsthat there's a danger of forgetting that it's an ongoing constellation of issues, not just something for the history books.

Nearly every article about Eric Holder stepping down as attorney general Thursday (including my own) mentioned his careful stewardship of civil rights, which he has made a focus of his nearly-six-year tenure. Some of what Holder has done falls squarely in the tradition of his role model for the job, Robert Kennedy. He has fought fiercely against state laws that limit voting by either requiring voters to have certain state IDs or limit voting times, and he was an outspoken critic of the Supreme Court's decision in Shelby County v. Holder, which effectively removed a major Justice Department tool for combatting voting restrictions. Voting laws are a classic federal enforcement area for civil rights.

With Eric Holder's Exit, Obama Loses a Key Ally

Holder was also, of course, the man who went to Ferguson, Missouri, serving as both an ambassador to try to cool tempers and a federal presence to investigate overzealous law enforcement and look into accusations of police brutality. Once again: It's classic Justice Department civil-rights work.

But Jeffrey Toobin made a great point in an interview with Vox's Ezra Klein. Asked to name Holder's biggest legacy, Toobin pointed to something he didn't do: Defend the Defense of Marriage Act against a legal challenge.

I think throwing the weight of the Justice Department behind the cause of gay rights will be seen as enormously important. Announcing support for the lawsuit against the Defense of Marriage Act [DOMA] was the biggest specific item in that regard, but in every possible way, the Justice Department has committed itself to the idea that discrimination against gay people is unlawful. That's had enormous implications, and it will continue to reverberate as same sex marriage works its way through the courts.

Gay marriage is clearly a civil-rights question, too. That's true whether you think it's a civil right that ought to be afforded or not. Because "civil rights" is so often taken to mean the 1960s push for racial equality, it's hard to speak about civil rights in a neutral way, and opponents of marriage equality bristle at the comparison, which they take to call them the same as '60s racistsa comparison many gay-marriage backers make explicit.

One of Holder's (many) notable entanglements with Republicans was a battle with Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal. The Justice Department sued Louisiana over its school-voucher program. In challenging vouchers, a favorite conservative education proposal, the department connected them to the long and ongoing battle to desegregate American schools, especially in the South. "Students leaving these schools with State-issued vouchers impeded the desegregation process," it argued in a brief. "Moreover, some of these schools had achieved or were close to achieving the desired degree of student racial diversity, and the loss of students through the voucher program reversed much of the progress made toward desegregation." Jindal replied by likening Holder to Governor George Wallace "standing in the schoolhouse door" to block integration; a not-amused Holder responded by mailing the governor a copy of Representative John Lewis's memoir of his civil-rights work.

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Eric Holder's Expansive Vision of Civil Rights

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Ducey and DuVal set for 4th debate Monday Ducey and DuVal set for 4th debate Monday

Republican Doug Ducey and Democrat Fred DuVal are set to debate for the fourth time as they seek to replace Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer, and they'll be joined by the Libertarian and Americans Elect party candidates.

Republican Doug Ducey and Democrat Fred DuVal are set to debate for the fourth time as they seek to replace Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer, and they'll be joined by the Libertarian and Americans Elect party candidates.

Have you ever wondered what political parties your favorite brands support? Well, there's an app for that.

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The candidates for Arizona's top education post meet in their first debate in a race where the Democratic party has a ripe opportunity to win a statewide office.

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Declaring the world at a crossroads between war and peace, President Barack Obama vowed at the U.N. on Wednesday to lead a coalition to dismantle an Islamic State "network of death" that has wreaked havoc in the Middle East and drawn the U.S. back into military action in the region.

Declaring the world at a crossroads between war and peace, President Barack Obama vowed at the U.N. on Wednesday to lead a coalition to dismantle an Islamic State "network of death" that has wreaked havoc in the Middle East and drawn the U.S. back into military action in the region.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona says a new state law making so-called "revenge porn" illegal is so broad it criminalizes booksellers, artists and even historians.

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Ducey and DuVal set for 4th debate Monday

Vote Republican Commercial with Chuck Yeager new

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Vote Republican Commercial with Chuck Yeager new - Video