Eric Himpton Holder Jr. was born in New York in 1951. His family had roots in Barbados: his father immigrated as a child, while his mother's family had immigrated before her birth. He grew up in Queens and attended Stuyvesant High School. He earned a history degree from Columbia in 1973 and a law degree there in 1976.
Holder joined the Justice Department through its Honors Program in 1976 and worked in the Public Integrity Section until 1988. President Ronald Reagan then appointed him to the Superior Court of the District of Columbia. In 1993, President Bill Clinton appointed him U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia.
He became deputy attorney general in 1997 and served until 2001. After leaving the department, he joined Covington & Burling. He returned to government in February 2009 as the nation's 82nd attorney general and the first African American to hold that position, serving under President Barack Obama until April 2015.
The department's record of his tenure describes a Federal Interagency Reentry Council established in 2011. Its work addressed barriers to employment, education, housing and other services after incarceration. Under his Smart on Crime initiative, he also directed department components to consider the additional consequences of criminal convictions when developing regulations and guidance.
