By Jovonne Ledet
December 30, 2024
Former President Jimmy Carter is being remembered for his contributions to the political careers of several Black women amid his death.
On Sunday (December 29), news broke that Carter died at age 100 surrounded by his family at his home in Plains, Georgia. Carter was the oldest living president and his state funeral is scheduled for January 9.
During his political career, Carter catapulted several Black women in politics amid the wave of feminist and gender activism following the Civil Rights Movement, NBC News reports.
Carter, who defeated incumbent Gerald Ford in the 1976 presidential election, picked Alexis M. Herman to serve as the director of the Labor Department’s Women’s Bureau, which was established in 1920. Herman said she initially met Carter while working on an experimental project to create a minority women’s employment program in Atlanta. She also served as a volunteer on the congressional campaign for civil rights leader Andrew Young, who introduced her to Carter.
“He was governor of Georgia then, and I was just a few years out of college,” Herman, an Alabama native and Xavier University alumna, said.
After being picked to serve in Carter’s administration, Herman returned to the department during Bill Clinton’s term as the country’s first Black labor secretary.
“There is not one single initiative related to women’s rights that did not have its foundation in the Carter administration,” Herman said.
Other Black women were boosted to key posts under Carter, including Patricia Roberts Harris, who was appointed as secretary of housing and urban development in 1977. Carter also named Harris the first secretary of the newly reorganized Department of Health and Human Services, making her the first woman to hold two different Cabinet positions.
Hazel R. O’Leary was catapulted through the ranks under the Carter administration, serving as chief administrator of the Economic Regulatory Administration in the newly created U.S. Department of Energy. The former president also picked Eleanor Holmes Norton, a current member of Congress, as the first woman to head the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in 1977.
Carter reportedly engaged regularly with Black congresswomen including Rep. Shirley Chisholm and Rep. Barbara Jordan, who campaigned for the former president and was a keynote speaker at the Democratic National Convention where he was nominated as the party’s candidate.
“The beauty of President Carter is he was ahead of his time,” Shavon Arline-Bradley, the president and CEO of the National Council of Negro Women, said in a statement.
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