Alexis Herman, a Democratic Party insider who grew up under segregation in Alabama and went on to become the first Black secretary of labor, a position in which she helped settle a crippling strike by United Parcel Service workers, died on Friday in Washington. She was 77.
Her death, after a brief illness, was announced by her family. The announcement did not say where in Washington she died.
President Bill Clinton was familiar with Ms. Herman when he nominated her as labor secretary in his second term. She had been the chief executive of the 1992 Democratic National Convention; deputy director of Mr. Clinton’s transition team after he won the 1992 presidential election; and the White House’s public liaison director during his first term.
When he nominated her for labor secretary, President Clinton referred to her work at the Office of Public Liaison, a grass-roots organizer of support for administration policies. “She has been my eyes and ears,” he said, “working to connect the American people, business and labor, individuals and communities with their government.”
Ms. Herman was only three months into running the Labor Department when 185,000 unionized U.P.S. workers went on strike in early August 1997, hobbling package deliveries nationwide.
Ms. Herman spent five days going room to room at a Washington hotel to persuade leaders of the U.P.S. and the teamsters’ union to focus on the issues.
“I wasn’t trying to be subtle,” she told the “Today” show after the 15-day strike ended. “I was trying to be very direct. I moved in with them.”
Joseph McCartin, a labor historian at Georgetown University, said that Ms. Herman’s role in settling the strike helped ameliorate tensions between the Clinton administration and the labor movement over issues like the impact of the North American Free Trade Agreement.
Ms. Herman also played a role in efforts to curtail sweatshops by creating a code of conduct and a monitoring system for American companies that make apparel overseas. She supported two increases in the minimum wage and helped gain passage of the Workforce Investment Act of 1998, an overhaul of job training programs.
During her tenure, unemployment dropped to a 30-year low.
Robert Reich, Ms. Herman’s predecessor as labor secretary, said in a statement, “I saw Alexis champion efforts to increase diversity in government and the workplace, and encourage young people to get involved in politics.”
Alexis Margaret Herman was born on July 16, 1947, in Mobile, Ala. Her mother, Gloria Broadus Caponis, was a schoolteacher. Her father, Alex Herman, owned an insurance company. He also owned the Chattanooga White Sox, a Negro minor league team, and signed the future Hall of Fame pitcher Satchel Paige to his first professional contract.
Mr. Herman was also a civil rights activist, a Democratic politician and a ward leader in Mobile.
After Ms. Herman and her father visited a minister on Christmas Eve when she was 5, their car was driven off a dirt road by one driven by members of the Ku Klux Klan. She recalled that her father handed her the small silver pistol that he brought for protection as he traveled to community meetings.
“He told me, ‘If anybody opens this door, I want you to pull this trigger,’” she told The Chicago Tribune in 1997.
He locked the door behind him and confronted the Klansmen, who beat him.
A year or so later, Ms. Herman was walking to her home with her mother, who was so tired that she decided that they would take a bus the rest of the way. When they boarded, her mother collapsed from exhaustion in the front seat. The bus driver told her to move to the back of the bus.
But she could not — or would not — and the driver wrested her from the seat, opened the door and pushed her onto the street.
“With tears in her eyes, torn stockings, and struggling to get off her knees, she held her head high and said to me, ‘Come on, Alexis, we’ll just keep walking,’” Ms. Herman wrote in an essay included in “My Mother’s Daughter” (2024), an anthology edited by Paulette Norvel Lewis.
Ms. Herman was educated in parochial schools to avoid having to attend segregated ones.
After graduating from Xavier College of Louisiana in 1969 with a bachelor’s degree in sociology, Ms. Herman was hired as a social worker at Catholic Charities in Mobile. In that job, she persuaded the city shipyard in nearby Pascagoula, Miss., to give apprenticeships to young Black laborers.
She moved to Atlanta to direct a program for the Southern Regional Council that lobbied corporations to hire Black women for white-collar jobs.
The program drew the attention of the new Carter administration; in 1977, she was named director of the Labor Department’s Women’s Bureau, which represents the needs of working women.
After President Jimmy Carter lost his bid for re-election in 1980, Ms. Herman formed a consulting firm with Ernest Green — one of the nine Black students who desegregated Little Rock High School in 1957 — that advised businesses on marketing and minority hiring issues. She soon began meeting influential Black political figures, including Andrew Young, the civil rights leader and former mayor of Atlanta; the Rev. Jesse Jackson, whose 1984 and 1988 presidential campaigns she joined; and Ronald H. Brown, who in 1989 became chairman of the Democratic National Committee. Ms. Herman became his deputy.
When Ms. Herman was nominated for labor secretary, her confirmation was held up for months, partly by a Senate investigation into whether she had used the Office of Public Liaison to help influential Democratic donors obtain access to President Clinton to plead for special interests. Some Republicans also brought up past claims that she had guided federal contracts and grants to cronies near the end of President Carter’s term.
She was cleared and confirmed by the Senate, 85 to 13.
In 2000, after a nearly two-year investigation, an independent prosecutor cleared her of accusations by a former business partner that she had accepted kickbacks in the awarding of federal contracts when she was running the Office of Public Liaison.
President Clinton insisted in a statement at the time that Ms. Herman had done nothing wrong and that he was “proud to call her my friend.”
Her marriage to Charles Franklin ended with his death in 2014. She is survived by her stepchildren, Charles Franklin Jr., Michele Franklin and Sherry Smith, and a cousin, Bernard Broadus.
After serving in the Clinton administration, Ms. Herman formed a consulting company, New Ventures, and served on the boards of Coca-Cola, Entergy and other companies. She was also a co-chair of the Bush-Clinton Katrina Fund in 2006 after Hurricane Katrina, and she joined the board of the Clinton-Bush Haiti Fund after the 2010 earthquake in Haiti.
She was president of the Dorothy I. Height Education Fund, named for the civil and women’s rights activist who was her mentor.
In a statement, Marc Morial, the president of the National Urban League, praised Ms. Herman, who was the senior vice chair of the organization’s board. Her “commitment to empowering underserved individuals and marginalized communities,” he said, “was fierce, genuine and unwavering.”
