When Alexis M. Herman first met Jimmy Carter in the 1970s, she had no idea how their paths would cross or how successful their careers would become.
“I had just graduated from college when he became governor of Georgia,” Herman added. The Xavier University graduate and native of Alabama was volunteering for civil rights activist Andrew Young’s congressional campaign when Andy introduced me to Jimmy Carter and informed him of my work.
Herman was working on a pilot project at the time to establish a minority women’s employment program in Atlanta. She recalled that it was the height of the women’s movement. However, some options were not available to women of color.
Through her efforts, the first Black women were hired for technical and professional positions at large companies like Delta Air Lines, Xerox, Coca-Cola, and General Motors. The initiative extended throughout the South from Georgia.
Carter seemed impressed. The Democrat nominated Herman to be the director of the Labor Department’s Women’s Bureau after he defeated incumbent Gerald Ford in the 1976 presidential election.
Herman rejoined the department as the nation’s first Black labor secretary during the Clinton administration, years later.
Black women made significant strides during Carter’s presidency, securing Cabinet-level appointments and judgeships. During the height of the Civil Rights Movement and the subsequent wave of feminist and gender activism, he served from 1977 to 1981.
Black women who worked with Carter during his administration told NBC News after the 2023 announcement that the 100-year-old former president had entered hospice care at home that Carter had long been a champion of women, particularly when changing gender standards coincided with his presidency. Carter passed away on Sunday.
When the women’s bureau was founded in 1920, Herman was the youngest person to hold the position of director, at the age of 29. Throughout her three-year term, she fought for women-focused policy concerns ranging from maternity leave and laws against sexual harassment to equal pay and child care.
According to Herman, the Carter administration laid the groundwork for every single women’s rights effort.
Since President Franklin D. Roosevelt named Frances Perkins labor secretary in 1933, Carter is one of just 12 American presidents to appoint women to Cabinet or Cabinet-level positions, according to Rutgers University’s Center for American Women and Politics. According to CAWP data, Carter appointed 18 women to such positions during his four years in the White House.
Black women were thrown into important positions under Carter, who received a resounding vote from Black voters in the 1976 presidential election, which they said helped him win.
He became the first Black woman to hold a Cabinet position in the White House when he chose Patricia Roberts Harris, an attorney and graduate of Howard University, as secretary of housing and urban development in 1977.
Harris later became the first woman to serve in two Cabinet roles when Carter appointed her as the first secretary of the newly restructured Department of Health and Human Services.
Originally from the Ford administration, Hazel R. O. Leary was a corporate lawyer who worked her way up under Carter to become the top administrator of the Economic Regulatory Administration in the newly established U.S. Department of Energy.
In 1977, Eleanor Holmes Norton, a member of Congress currently serving the District of Columbia, was appointed by Carter to lead the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission as its first female chair.
Shavon Arline-Bradley, president and CEO of the National Council of Negro Women, claimed that President Carter’s inclusion of Black women in important jobs was a sign that he was ahead of his time. Dorothy Height, the late civil rights activist who oversaw NCNW for forty years, was the person she referred to.
Carter appointed her to the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research, according to Height’s book, Open Wide the Freedom Gates.
The remaining fifteen members were experts in a variety of disciplines, including education, ethics, medicine, law, and health. She wrote, “I was a public member.” And I shared what I had discovered from working directly with impoverished women with the commission. I could speak for women who were aware that their rights had been infringed. I pushed for policies to be written in a way that was easy to comprehend and had a role in forming recommendations for public policy.
Carter frequently interacted with the members of the Congressional Black Caucus of that era, despite the fact that they occasionally criticized his policies and their effects on Black Americans. Among them were powerful Black congresswomen on Capitol Hill and the national scene, such as Rep. Shirley Chisholm, a Democrat with Caribbean ancestry who was made to cry when criticizing the administration’s Haiti policy.
In addition to campaigning for Carter, Rep. Barbara Jordan served as the keynote speaker at the Democratic National Convention, where he received the party’s nomination.
According to Carla Brailey, an assistant professor of sociology and senior fellow at Texas Southern University’s Barbara Jordan Institute for Policy Research, where Jordan graduated, Carter and Jordan were political friends.
She claimed that after winning the election, Carter put Barbara Jordan on his shortlist for the position of attorney general. According to Brailey, Jordan was offered a role at the United Nations, which she reportedly did not want, but she did not get the job.
Carter was raised in Plains, Georgia, where his mother worked as a certified nurse and his father was a farmer and merchant. During a time of segregation, he developed warm and affectionate bonds with Black neighbors in his tiny town as a boy. He went home to manage his family’s peanut farm after serving in the military as a naval officer, and he eventually ran for public office.
The former president collaborated with Karin Ryan, senior policy adviser for human rights at the Carter Center in Atlanta, for around thirty years. Regarding the Carter administration and post-administration, she stated that women’s rights, democracy, and human rights are essential to our work.
The center has prioritized the advancement of women’s and girls’ rights around the world under former first lady Rosalynn Carter. Carter stated in his 2014 book A Call to Action: Women, Religion, Violence, and Power that the most severe, widespread, and disregarded violation of fundamental human rights in the world is the violence and discrimination against women and girls.
He condemned traditions including genital mutilation, honor killings, and sex trafficking in public addresses and criticized misreadings of religious texts that reduced women to a subordinate position.
The center’s current initiatives support women’s leadership in peacebuilding, sexual exploitation prevention, and enhancing the ability of organizations working with developing countries to advance gender equality, increase women’s educational opportunities, and more.
The cradle of the Civil Rights Movement, Georgia’s 5th Congressional District, is represented by Democrat Rep. Nikema Williams.
Jimmy Carter, the president, is an inspiration. In a statement, Williams added, “He never stopped working for peace, democracy, and uplifting those most marginalized.” In honor of this outstanding president, I gave my son the name Carter. Every day, I work to ensure that Carter shares his namesake’s humility and dedication to service.
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