Alexis Herman Opened the Doors of Labor

Builders of Multiracial Democracy · Part 5 of 5

Alexis Margaret Herman died on April 25, 2025, in Washington, after a brief illness. She was seventy-seven. The obituaries that followed rightly led with the milestone: in 1997 she became the first Black American to serve as United States secretary of labor, capping a career that stretched from the segregated South of her childhood to the Cabinet room. But the milestone alone flattens her story. Herman's life traced a full arc of Black political achievement in the late twentieth century — the movement generation's children moving from the courthouse steps into the corridors of federal power, and refusing to leave the doors shut behind them.

Herman was born on July 16, 1947, in Mobile, Alabama, the daughter of a teacher and of Alex Herman, a civic leader described by The HistoryMakers as the first Black politician elected in the South since Reconstruction. Politics in the Herman household was not an abstraction. As a child, Alexis watched Ku Klux Klan members assault her father — an experience the Washington Post placed at the front of her obituary, because she carried it with her for the rest of her life.

A Child of Segregated Mobile

She graduated from a Catholic high school in Mobile and went on to Xavier University of Louisiana in New Orleans, the nation's only historically Black Catholic university, where she joined Delta Sigma Theta Sorority and earned a bachelor's degree in sociology in 1969. The historically Black college that formed her would remain a through-line: Herman's career was built in the institutions the movement had forced open, and she spent it widening them.

The Youngest Director

Jimmy Carter appointed Herman director of the Labor Department's Women's Bureau in 1977. She was twenty-nine — the youngest person ever to hold the post. The Women's Bureau was then the federal government's chief advocate for working women, and Herman used it to push on equal pay, job training, and the barriers that kept women, and especially Black women, out of skilled work.

When the Carter administration ended, she did not wait for another appointment. In 1981 she founded her own consulting firm, and over the next dozen years she moved through the senior ranks of the Democratic Party, including service as deputy chair of the Democratic National Committee.

Her most consequential political schooling came in Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition campaigns. In 1984 and again in 1988, Herman was among the senior strategists who helped manage Jackson's presidential bids, the campaigns that registered and mobilized more than a million new voters and assembled a multiracial coalition of Black voters, Latino communities, farmers, unionized workers and white progressives. In 1988 she helped carry that coalition's weight into the Democratic convention, where Jackson's delegates pressed the party on rules, voting rights and platform demands. The work tied her to the generation of Black operatives, Ron Brown among them, who turned Jackson's insurgency into lasting power inside the party. When Brown became the first Black chair of the Democratic National Committee in 1989, he made Herman his chief of staff. When Bill Clinton won the White House in 1992, Herman went with him as assistant to the president and director of the White House Office of Public Liaison — the administration's bridge to the constituencies, labor unions, civil rights organizations, and business groups whose support governing required.

The First at Labor

Clinton nominated Herman as secretary of labor in December 1996, calling her a leader who "understands the needs of workers and understands the challenges they face as we approach the 21st century." Confirmed in the spring of 1997, she became the twenty-third secretary of labor and the first African American to head the department — a department whose mission, protecting the wages, safety, and dignity of working people, had been entwined with Black freedom struggles since A. Philip Randolph threatened to march on Washington half a century earlier.

Her defining test came within months. In August 1997, some 185,000 Teamsters walked out at United Parcel Service in the largest American strike in years. Herman threw the department into mediation, pressing both sides toward a settlement that ended the walkout after fifteen days and was widely credited to her personal intervention. It was the kind of victory that rarely makes a secretary famous but that defines a tenure: working people kept their leverage, and the country kept moving.

Herman organized the department around three goals — a prepared workforce, a secure workforce, and a quality workforce — with particular attention to job training and to the workers the economy was most inclined to discard. She held the post through the end of the Clinton administration in January 2001.

After the Cabinet

Herman's most consequential later work came where government meets corporate accountability. In 2001, after Coca-Cola settled a landmark racial discrimination lawsuit brought by Black employees, the company named her chair of its Human Resource Task Force, charged with enforcing the settlement's reforms from inside the boardroom. She later served on Toyota's diversity advisory board and, in 2006, headed a special task force on the company's anti-discrimination compliance. She understood what some civil rights veterans resisted seeing: that the private sector, not only the state, was now a front line of workplace equality.

Why Her Story Matters Now

Herman's death arrives on the eve of an election in which nearly everything she built is on the ballot. Her career rested on four commitments: the dignity of labor, equality on the job, fair wages and a federal government that looks like the country it serves. Each is under open attack today.

Labor. As secretary she treated the Department of Labor as the workers' department, settling the 1997 UPS strike talks and pushing job training for people the economy had left behind. Today that department's enforcement staff and training programs are being cut.

Equality. From the Women's Bureau in the Carter years to the cabinet, she enforced the rules against discrimination in hiring and pay. Those protections are now being stripped under the banner of ending "DEI."

Fair wages. Her tenure began as the federal minimum wage rose to $5.15 in 1997, and she championed living wages and equal pay for women. The federal minimum has not moved since 2009.

A government that looks like America. In the Clinton White House she helped recruit the most diverse administration in the nation's history to that point. Today, diversity in federal service is treated as a target to purge rather than a strength to build.

Remembering her is not nostalgia. These institutions were won, not given, and they were built by people who had personally watched what happens when the powerful face no counterweight. The doors she opened remain open only if someone keeps walking through them, and on Tuesday, that means voting.

Builders of Multiracial Democracy

This piece is part 5 of five in the HistorianSpeaks series Builders of Multiracial Democracy, tracing how Black leaders built the coalition at the center of American democracy:

1. Cultivating Democracy: Jesse Jackson and the Multiracial Bench 2. Unbought, Unbossed, Unfinished: Shirley Chisholm and the Road to Hakeem Jeffries 3. “My Faith in the Constitution Is Whole”: Barbara Jordan, Gus Adair and Texas 4. The Chicago Blueprint: Harold Washington, Jesse Jackson and Carol Moseley Braun 5. Alexis Herman Opened the Doors of Labor (you are here)

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The history we write here is not a collection of isolated past events. It is the thread that ties together, connects and extends the Black struggle for justice, equity and inclusion, from historic moments in the past to monumental changes in the present. Experience these moments in our blogs, and go deeper in the long-form features of our magazine, Black Thread. Subscribe free, or become a Founding Member at $9.99 a month for life.