When Alexis M. Herman first met Jimmy Carter back in the 1970s, she never imagined how their fates would intertwine, nor the heights to which their careers would rise.
“He was governor of Georgia then, and I was just a few years out of college,” Herman said. Herman, an Alabama native and Xavier University alumna, was a volunteer on civil rights leader Andrew Young’s congressional campaign when “Andy introduced me to Jimmy Carter and told him of the work I was doing.”
At the time, Herman was involved in an experimental project to create a minority women’s employment program in Atlanta. “It was the height of the women’s movement,” she recalled. “But women of color were not getting certain opportunities.”
Her efforts helped place the first Black women in professional and technical roles at major corporations such as General Motors, Coca-Cola, Xerox and Delta Air Lines. From Georgia, the initiative spread across the South.
Carter seemed impressed. After he defeated incumbent Gerald Ford in the 1976 presidential election, he nominated Herman to be director of the Women’s Bureau in the Labor Department.
Years later, during the Clinton administration, Herman returned to the department — this time as the country’s first Black labor secretary.
From judgeships to Cabinet-level appointments, Black women broke ground in Carter’s administration. He was in office from 1977 to 1981, amid the wave of feminist and gender activism that followed the height of the Civil Rights Movement.
After the announcement last year that Carter, 100, had entered hospice care at home, Black women who worked with Carter during his administration told NBC News that Carter, who died Sunday, had long been a champion of women, notably as shifting gender norms coincided with his term.
At 29, Herman was the youngest person to fill the director role at the Women’s Bureau, which was established in 1920. She spent her three-year tenure advocating for women-centric policy issues that ran the gamut from equal pay and child care to maternity leave and sexual harassment protections.
“There is not one single initiative related to women’s rights that did not have its foundation in the Carter administration,” Herman said.
According to the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University, Carter is one of 12 presidents who have appointed women to Cabinet or Cabinet-level positions since President Franklin D. Roosevelt named Frances Perkins labor secretary in 1933. During his four years in the White House, Carter appointed four women to such positions, CAWP data shows.
