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 respective careers would rise.
“He was governor of Georgia then, and I was just a few years out of college,” Herman said. The Alabama native and Xavier University alumna was a volunteer on the congressional campaign for civil rights leader Andrew Young, when “Andy introduced me to Jimmy Carter and told him of the work I was doing.”
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WATCH HEREAt 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.”
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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 defeating incumbent Gerald Ford in the 1976 presidential election, the Democrat nominated Herman to serve as 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 in 2023 that the 100-year-old former president 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 for 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 only 12 U.S. 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 18 women to such positions, CAWP data shows.
Under Carter — whom Black voters overwhelmingly supported in the 1976 presidential race, a contest they were credited with helping him win — Black women were catapulted into key posts.
In 1977, he appointed Patricia Roberts Harris, a Howard University alumna and attorney, as secretary of housing and urban development, making her the first Black woman to serve as a White House Cabinet secretary.
When Carter later named Harris the first secretary of the newly reorganized Department of Health and Human Services, she became the first woman to hold two different Cabinet positions.
Hazel R. O’Leary, a corporate attorney who initially joined the Ford administration, rose through the ranks under Carter to serve as chief administrator of the Economic Regulatory Administration in the newly created U.S. Department of Energy.
Carter tapped Eleanor Holmes Norton, currently a member of Congress representing the District of Columbia, to become the first woman to head the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in 1977.
“The beauty of President Carter is he was ahead of his time,” because of his inclusion of Black women in key roles, said Shavon Arline-Bradley, the president and CEO of the National Council of Negro Women. She pointed to Dorothy Height, the late civil rights leader who led NCNW for four decades.
In her book, “Open Wide the Freedom Gates,” Height wrote that Carter appointed her to the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research.
“The other fifteen members were professionals in fields like medicine, ethics, law, health and education. I was a public member,” she wrote. “And I brought to the commission what I had learned face to face with poor women. I could be the voice of women who knew that their rights had been violated. I had something to contribute in the shaping of public policy recommendations and pressed for policies to be written so that they were understandable.”
While the Congressional Black Caucus of that era was sometimes critical of Carter’s policies and the impact on Black Americans, he regularly engaged with its members. That included Black congresswomen who were powerhouses on Capitol Hill and the national stage, like Rep. Shirley Chisholm, a Democrat with Caribbean roots who was reportedly driven to tears while calling out the administration’s Haiti policy.
Rep. Barbara Jordan campaigned for Carter and was a keynote speaker at the Democratic National Convention where he was nominated as the party’s candidate.
“Carter and Jordan were political allies,” said Carla Brailey, an assistant professor of sociology and a senior fellow at the Barbara Jordan Institute for Policy Research at Texas Southern University, where Jordan was an alumna.
Once elected, “Carter reportedly considered Barbara Jordan on his shortlist for the job of attorney general,” she said. Jordan did not get the job, Brailey said, but was offered a United Nations post — a position she apparently did not covet.
Carter grew up in Plains, Georgia, where his father was a farmer and businessman and his mother, a registered nurse. As a child, he formed close, endearing relationships with Black members of his small community in an era of segregation. Following military service as a naval officer, he returned home to run his family’s peanut farm, before later seeking public office.
Karin Ryan, senior policy adviser for human rights at the Atlanta-based Carter Center, worked alongside the former president for some three decades. “Human rights, democracy and women’s rights are pivotal to our work,” she said of the Carter presidency and post-presidency.
With former first lady Rosalynn Carter, the center has placed a major emphasis on advancing the rights of women and girls globally. In his 2014 book, “A Call to Action: Women, Religion, Violence, and Power,” Carter wrote, “The world’s discrimination and violence against women and girls is the most serious, pervasive, and ignored violation of basic human rights.”
In public speeches, he challenged misinterpretations of religious scriptures relegating women to secondary status and decried practices such as genital mutilation, honor killings and sex trafficking.
Today, the center’s programs promote women’s leadership in peacebuilding, combating sexual exploitation, and strengthening the capacity of organizations serving less developed nations to promote gender equality, improve women’s access to education and more.
Rep. Nikema Williams, a Democrat, represents Georgia’s 5th Congressional District, known as the cradle of the Civil Rights Movement.
“President Jimmy Carter is an inspiration. He never stopped working for peace, democracy and uplifting those most marginalized,” Williams said in a statement. “I named my son Carter after this great President. I strive everyday to make sure Carter has the same humility and commitment to service as his namesake.”
Jimmy Carter's life in pictures
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