The first U.S. attorney general was Edmund Jennings Randolph, who began serving in 1789, but it wasn’t until Amos Akerman became attorney general under Pres. Ulysses S. Grant in 1870 that the Justice Department was created. Akerman is credited with holding powerful railroad companies to account and with vigorously prosecuting the activities of the Ku Klux Klan during Reconstruction. In 1961 Pres. John F. Kennedy named his brother Robert Kennedy as his attorney general. In the 1970s, under Pres. Gerald Ford, Edward H. Levi did a great deal to restore public trust in the Justice Department in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal. In 1993 Janet Reno became the first woman to serve in the post. In 2009 Eric Holder became the first Black attorney general.
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