This concludes CNW’s Black History Month series highlighting African American men and women who made history when they served as Cabinet secretaries to respective United States presidents.
Jeh Charles Johnson (born September 11, 1957)
Johnson, an attorney, was nominated as U.S. secretary of homeland security by President Barack Obama during Obama’s second term in 2013 and remained in the post until January 2017.
Prior to serving in the Cabinet, from 2009 to 2012, Johnson was the general counsel of the Department of Defense. Johnson was also a federal prosecutor and general counsel of the Department of the Air Force before serving in the Obama administration.
Johnson was born in New York City, and raised in Wappingers Falls, New York. He’s the grandson of sociologist and Fisk University President Charles S. Johnson. Former Secretary Johnson was named Jeh for a Liberian chief, who was said to have saved his grandfather’s life while on a mission to Liberia with the League of Nations in 1930.
With a less than stellar high school career at Roy C. Ketcham High School where he was earning C and D grades, Johnson’s vision of becoming at attorney became a motivating factor when he entered Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia. He graduated from Morehouse with a Bachelor of Arts degree, and later from Colombia Law School with the Juris Doctor degree.
Since 2020, Johnson has been a partner at the law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison and a member of the boards of directors of Lockheed Martin and U.S. Steel.
Loretta Elizabeth Lynch (born May 21, 1959)
Lynch Lynch, an attorney, succeeded Eric Holder as U.S. attorney general in President Obama’s Cabinet, serving from 2015 to 2017.
Before serving as the 83rd attorney general, and first African-American woman U.S. attorney general, she served as the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York under Presidents Bill Clinton (1999–2001) and Obama (2010–2015).
Lynch was born in Greensboro, North Carolina and grew up with parents who attended Shaw University—an HBCU where the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was founded.
Young Lynch spend hours with her father watching court proceedings in the Durham, North Carolina courthouse. She also developed a keen interest in assisting people marginalized by racism on hearing stories about her grandfather, a sharecropper and pastor, who in the 1930s helped people move to the north to escape racial persecution in the then segregated south.
Lynch earned a Bachelor of Arts in English and American literature from Harvard College in 1981 and a Juris Doctor from Harvard Law School in 1984, where she was a member of the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau. She also was awarded an honorary degree from Duke University.
Following her graduation from Harvard, she became a federal prosecutor in New York in 1990, rising to head the Eastern District office. From 2003 to 2005, she served on the board of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
Anthony Renard Foxx (born April 30, 1971)
Foxx, another of President Barack Obama’s Cabinet appointees, served as U.S. secretary of transportation from 2013 to 2017. Fox, who is an attorney, had the distinction of being one of the few cabinet nominees to have received unanimous confirmation by the Senate.
His appointment to Obama’s Cabinet followed his tenure as mayor of Charlotte, North Carolina from 2009 to 2013. When he was elected as Charlotte’s mayor, he created history as the youngest mayor of that city.
Foxx was born in Charlotte, North Carolina, and as a youth attended and graduated from West Charlotte High School. He would go on to major in history at Davidson College, where he also served as the first African-American student body president. Following his graduation from Davidson College, he went to New York University School of Law, graduating with a Juris Doctor…
Read More: BLACK HISTORY MONTH: African-American Cabinet Secretaries Throughout US History