Alexis Herman

Alexis Margaret Herman (July 16, 1947 – April 25, 2025) was an American political figure who served as the 23rd United States Secretary of Labor from 1997 to 2001 under President Bill Clinton. She was the first Black American to hold the position. She was previously Assistant to the President and Director of the White House Office of Public Engagement.

Herman grew up in Mobile, Alabama. After college, she worked to improve employment opportunities for black laborers and women. She then joined the administration of Jimmy Carter, working as director of the Labor Department's Women's Bureau. She became active in the Democratic party, working in the campaigns of Jesse Jackson and then serving as chief of staff for the Democratic National Committee under Ronald H. Brown. She joined the cabinet of President Bill Clinton in 1997.

Following the defeat of Al Gore in the 2000 presidential election, Herman remained active in Democratic politics, in addition to her participation in the private sector, serving on the boards of corporations such as Coca-Cola and Toyota.

Herman was born on July 16, 1947, in Mobile, Alabama, the daughter of politician Alex Herman and schoolteacher Gloria Caponis, and raised in a Catholic household. Her father became Alabama's first black ward leader. She later recounted how members of the white supremacist group, the Ku Klux Klan, assaulted her father when she was five years old.

When Herman was growing up in Mobile, schools remained racially segregated. Her parents opted to send Alexis to parochial school, including Heart of Mary High School, in part because the teachers included white nuns and priests, and thus would expose her to greater diversity.

As a sophomore, she was suspended from school for questioning the Archdiocese of Mobile's exclusion of black students from religious pageants in which white students participated. Following a week of objection from the parents of Herman's fellow black classmates, she was re-admitted.

After graduating from high school, Herman attended Edgewood College in Madison, Wisconsin, and Spring Hill College in Mobile. She transferred to Xavier University of Louisiana in New Orleans, where she became an active member of the Gamma Alpha Chapter of the Delta Sigma Theta sorority and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Sociology in 1969.

After college, Herman returned to Mobile to help desegregate their parochial schools, including the school she herself attended. She was then a social worker with Catholic Charities in Pascagoula, Mississippi, where she advocated for the city's shipyard to offer training to unskilled black laborers. After Pascagoula, Herman moved to Atlanta, Georgia, where she worked as a director of the Southern Regional Council's Black Women's Employment Program, a program designed to promote minority women into managerial or technical jobs.

Later, working at New-York-based consulting firm RTP, Herman led programs designed to provide apprenticeships for women in nontraditional jobs. At RTP, she met Ray Marshall. After Jimmy Carter became president in 1977, he and his incoming Labor Secretary Marshall asked Herman to be director of the Labor Department's Women's Bureau. At age 29, she was the youngest person to hold the position, which required her to work towards improving business opportunities for women. She worked to encourage corporations to hire more minority women, with companies like Coca-Cola, Delta Air Lines, and General Motors making increased diversity a priority in their hiring process.

In 1981, at the end of the Carter administration, Herman left her job in the Labor Department and founded the consulting firm A.M. Herman & Associates. Herman and the firm worked with corporations on a variety of marketing and management issues, including how to develop training programs, marketing strategies, and organizational strategies. She managed the convention team for Jesse Jackson in his 1984 and 1988 bids for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination. Her role working for Jackson's campaign led Herman to serve as chief of staff to Democratic National Committee Chairman Ronald H. Brown, and later as vice chair of the 1992 Democratic National Convention.

After Bill Clinton's victory in the 1992 Presidential election, Herman became deputy director of the Presidential Transition Office. Clinton then appointed her director of the White House Office of Public Liaison, where she was responsible for the administration's relations with interest groups. In that role, Herman repeatedly organized informal dinners to advance White House initiatives or assuage key groups. She earned the support of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Congressional Black Caucus as part of her outreach efforts. Herman also earned the respect of members of the business community as part of her effort to gain support for the Clinton Administration's trade deal, the North American Free Trade Agreement.

Herman's time as director also included the death of Commerce Secretary, and Herman's former boss at the Democratic National Committee, Ronald Brown, in a plane crash. As director, Herman made arrangements for public and private grieving following the death. The tragedy strengthened Herman's bond with President Clinton, who like Herman, had been close to Brown.

Herman was awarded more than 30 honorary doctorate degrees from academic institutions.

In 1994, she received an honorary degree from her alma mater, Xavier University, and served as the commencement speaker.

Herman was Queen of Carnival for the Mobile Area Mardi Gras Association in 1974. Her father had served as King of Carnival in his youth.

Herman married physician Charles Franklin Jr. in February 2000 at the Washington National Cathedral. Franklin had three children from previous marriages. He died in 2014 following an extended illness.