WASHINGTON
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.”
For the people marching in the streets for more than a year after the killing of Breonna Taylor, a wide-ranging new federal investigation of policing in
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USA TODAY
WASHINGTON – The Senate on Tuesday narrowly confirmed Kristen Clarke to be the Justice Department s civil rights chief, making her the first Black woman to fill the high-profile role.
The Senate voted 51-48 to confirm Clarke, with Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, as the lone Republican to support President Joe Biden s nominee to lead a powerful division of the Justice Department that s in charge of investigating police abuses and enforcing voting rights laws and federal statutes prohibiting discrimination based on race, sex, religion and other factors.
Clarke fills the post at a pivotal time for the Justice Department, as high-profile deaths of Black citizens during encounters with police have led to months of social justice protests and calls for reform. Clarke, a longtime civil rights attorney, is expected to play a pivotal role in reinvigorating the Justice Department s investigations of troubled police agencies, which languished during the Trump administration.
The controversial Biden pick was confirmed by the Senate to oversee the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division with a vote along partisan lines.
Kristen Clarke, an attorney tapped by President Joe Biden for a directorship at the Department of Justice, testifies before the the Senate Judiciary Committee last month. (Image via Courthouse News)
WASHINGTON (CN) Civil rights attorney Kristen Clarke was confirmed Tuesday as an assistant attorney general to oversee the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. She is the first woman and woman of color to lead the division since its founding in 1957.
The vote was split 51-48 mostly along party lines, with Senator Susan Collins of Maine being the only Republican in favor of Clarke’s confirmation.