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Eric Holder departure from Obama administration creates void on civil rights issues
By contrast, Holder – who worked for the NAACP legal defense fund early in his career, has been more outspoken. His sister-in-law, Vivian Malone Jones, became a hero in the desegregation movement of the 1960s after she was blocked from entering the University of Alabama when she arrived for classes.
“I think in his own way, using his role as Attorney General, Holder has addressed issues that remain off-limits,” said Wade Henderson, president of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. Holder talked openly about his own experiences with racial profiling after Trayvon Martin, a black teenager in Florida, was shot last year.
Holder talked about the humiliation of being pulled over and searched on the New Jersey turnpike when he was not speeding, and about being stopped by police while running in Washington’s tony Georgetown neighborhood.
In August, after unarmed African American teenager Michael Brown was shot and killed by a white policeman in Ferguson, sparking nights of riots, Obama sent Holder to meet with community members. Holder vowed the Justice Department would investigate whether criminal and civil charges are warranted, but the probe is unlikely to be complete before his departure.
As he listed his accomplishments, Holder acknowledged that “work remains to be done.” On his to-do list in the weeks before he leaves, Holder hopes to announce new guidelines to curb racial profiling in federal law enforcement investigations, the Justice Department said.
Holder has asked federal prosecutors not to seek mandatory minimum sentences to be used when charging defendants in low-level drug cases. But more sweeping proposals to abolish mandatory minimum sentences have failed to get traction in Congress.
Holder announced earlier this year that the department would review potentially hundreds of applications for executive clemency, another project that is under way but unfinished.
