National: Kristen Clarke likely first Black woman to lead DOJ civil rights | Del Quentin Wilbur/Los Angeles Times
Kristen Clarke was looking for a new athletic challenge during her junior year in high school. Girls’ basketball didn’t interest her because she couldn’t dribble. Girls’ ice hockey? She didn’t skate. Volleyball didn’t seem intense enough. Then she recalled how hard the boys’ wrestling team worked out. They ran until they sweated off enough pounds to make a weight class. They lifted weights. They left practice exhausted. So, in an audacious move for the early 1990s, Clarke joined the boys’ team. “They were giving it everything. If she was going to do a winter sport, she said, ‘might as well do the most difficult one,’” recalled Window Snyder, a friend and classmate of Clarke’s at the prestigious Choate Rosemary Hall in Connecticut. “I don’t think she ever even thought about it being a boys’ sport. That is who she was. Whatever she was doing had to be challenging.” That Clarke took to the boys’ mat doesn’t surprise friends or colleagues of a 46-year-old civil rights attorney whom President Biden has nominated to lead the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. They say she has spent two decades breaking down barriers and fighting discrimination, and it does not surprise them Biden would select her to become the first woman of color to formally lead a unit that former Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. called the agency’s “crown jewel.” Though Clarke is expected to be confirmed as early as Tuesday by a simple majority in the U.S. Senate, her path to the job has been contentious.
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