The many tributes to Alexis Herman that appeared after she died last month at the age of 77 cited the long list of her accomplishments.
The youngest-ever director of the Women’s Bureau at the U.S. Department of Labor, at 29, under President Jimmy Carter. The first Black Secretary of Labor under President Bill Clinton. Her legendary handling of the 1997 United Parcel Service strike — the largest in the U.S. in two decades.
The Alabama Business Hall of Fame calls her “one of the most accomplished women to ever emerge from Alabama.”
But the real measure of her success is not what she achieved herself but what her work allowed others to achieve.
In his eulogy of Herman last month, Clinton recalled a memo she authored in the earliest days of his presidency, as director of the White House Office of Public Liaison, recommending “that the first thing we do was to push the passage of the Family and Medical Leave Act.”
The memo, Clinton said, “was like her: straightforward but elegant.”
In the 32 years since then, the Family and Medical Leave Act has been used 500 million times.
Very few of us think of Herman when we are able to take time away from our jobs without losing our health insurance after the birth of a child or to care for our ailing parents, but she is the one who pushed the brand-new Clinton administration to make it happen.
How many children in Mobile, Alabama, were able to receive a quality education because she worked to desegregate the city’s parochial schools in the early 1970s?
How many women achieved career success through the Black Women’s Employment Program she directed, the apprenticeship programs she designed as a consultant, her factory-floor-to-the-boardroom initiatives at the Women’s Bureau or the welfare-to-work program she championed as Labor Secretary?
How many children around the world were protected from slavery, trafficking, bondage and other abuses by the Child Labor Convention she negotiated?
Her guiding hand as vice-chair of the National Urban League Board of Trustees has allowed us to serve nearly 4 million Americans a year with job training and placement, housing counseling, education programs and mentorship for college-bound and at-risk youth and initiatives to promote voting and civic engagement.
We may never know how many lives were enriched and empowered by her unflagging dedication to public service, but we can trace that dedication to the obstacles she was forced to overcome early in her life.
She was only 5 when she watched Ku Klux Klan members brutalize her father in retaliation for his work to register Black voters. Just before getting out of the car to confront the Klan members, he pressed a small silver pistol into her hand and told her to squeeze the trigger if anyone managed to get into the car.
The supportive and sympathetic white priests and nuns at her segregated parochial school provided a stark contrast to the Klan. “The best people we knew were white — people we spent the whole day with, who were the best examples of moral behavior,” a classmate told The New York Times.
As a result, Herman developed an exceptional skill for bridging the racial gap and persuading corporations to hire and promote college-educated Black women in managerial and executive positions.
Of the many accolades and tributes that were shared at her funeral, the one that the Alexis Herman I knew would’ve appreciated most was Clinton’s closing quip:
“If she were here, she would say, ‘This is all very moving, now please go write your memo. We still have work to do.'”
Marc H. Morial is president and CEO of the National Urban League and was mayor of New Orleans from 1994 to 2002. He writes a twice-monthly column for the Sun-Times.
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