Aileen Clarke Hernandez

American civil rights and feminist leader

• Born: May 23, 1926
• Birthplace: Brooklyn, New York
• Died: February 13, 2017
• Place of death: Irvine, California

As president of the National Organization for Women, director of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union, and commissioner of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), Hernandez represented the interests of women and ethnic minorities in the forefront of social reform. She was the first African American woman to hold a national office as EEOC commissioner, and she became a critic of mainstream, organized feminism for its focus on issues affecting mainly white, upper-middle-class women.

Early Life

Aileen Clarke Hernandez was born in Brooklyn, New York, to Charles and Ethel Clarke, who had emigrated from Jamaica and eventually became US citizens. Her mother was a costume maker and seamstress in the New York theater district, and her father worked in the art-supply business. Hernandez and her brothers were taught to cook and sew because her parents believed that no gender distinctions should be made in employment. They also emphasized that people should not be treated differently because of race or gender. This family value left an indelible mark on Hernandez, and it would deeply influence her life and career.

Hernandez graduated from Bay Ridge Public School as class valedictorian and, in 1943, from Bay Ridge High School as class salutatorian. She received a scholarship to attend Howard University in Washington, DC; served as editor and writer for the campus paper, The Hilltop; and wrote a column for the Washington Tribune. In 1946, she received honors in Kappa Mu Society, Howard’s counterpart to Phi Beta Kappa.

Hernandez’s political philosophy was molded by her college years in Washington, during the postwar period. She joined the student chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and demonstrated against the racial discrimination of the National Theatre, Lisner Auditorium, and the Thompson restaurant chain. Moving south for her college years at Howard, she experienced even more discrimination as she traveled by train and waited for the segregated taxis in Washington, which were always the last in line. Believing that a “democratic government requires full participation by all citizens,” she supported equal rights for African American World War II veterans returning to an unchanged, segregated America.

After graduating magna cum laude from Howard in 1947 with a degree in sociology and political science, Hernandez traveled to Norway as part of the International Student Exchange Program and studied comparative government. Having recovered at home from an attack of tuberculosis, she attended New York University; the University of California, Los Angeles; and the University of Southern California. In 1959, she was awarded a master’s degree in government, summa cum laude, from Los Angeles State College. Southern Vermont College would grant her an honorary doctorate in humane letters in 1979.

Life’s Work

While attending New York University for graduate school, Hernandez accepted an internship to the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) Training Institute. She was hired in 1951 and transferred to the ILGWU Pacific Coast region in California as an organizer. Eventually she served for eleven years in the ILGWU’s West Coast office in Los Angeles as an education director and public relations director. Her duties ranged from organizing social affairs to mobilizing strikes, pickets, and legislative lobbies. She also was responsible for naturalization classes for foreign-born union employees. In 1957, she married Alfonso Hernandez, a Mexican American garment worker she had met in Los Angeles. They divorced in 1961.

In 1961, Hernandez’s career shifted from union work to politics, after managing a victorious campaign for Alan Cranston as California state controller. She was appointed assistant chief of the California Division of the Fair Employment Practice Commission (FEPC) in 1962. In this position she supervised a staff of fifty in four field offices. While serving with the FEPC, she initiated the Technical Advisory Committee (TACT). The TACT report was a comprehensive analysis of industrial testing as it affects the hiring of minorities and the results prompted revisions in tests used by employers as a criterion for hiring.

By this time, Hernandez had acquired recognition for her work in labor relations and fair employment practices. With the recommendation of California governor Edmund G. “Pat” Brown, US president Lyndon B. Johnson appointed her the first woman to the five-member Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). Her duties included coordinating the activities of state and local commissions with the national EEOC. During her term on the commission, commercial airlines overturned their traditional policy of firing female flight attendants when they married, and she helped focus the commission on racial discrimination in construction unions and the gender discrimination, implicit or overt, in many labor laws pertaining to women. After eighteen months of service, she resigned from the EEOC because she felt that the commission lacked any power to enforce its own policies. In 1967, she established her own consulting firm in San Francisco, California, called Aileen C. Hernandez Associates, to advise businesses, government agencies, labor organizations, and private groups in urban affairs.

Hernandez was present in 1966 at the Third National Conference of the State Commissions on Women in Washington, DC. Betty Friedan, author of the 1963 best seller The Feminine Mystique, also was there, and they spoke of establishing a civil rights movement for women. The National Organization for Women (NOW) was created at this conference, and Friedan was chosen as its first president. Initially declining an offer to become a national vice president, Hernandez accepted a 1967 appointment as vice president of the Western region. In 1970, she succeeded Friedan as president of NOW.

Hernandez’s leadership and articulation of the women’s movement were major assets. Until 1971 many African American women viewed the women’s movement as the elitist preserve of white, upper-middle-class women. Hernandez considered NOW an extension of the civil rights movement for all women. In one interview, Hernandez addressed the issue head-on when she said,

Until women, black as well as others, gain a sense of their own identity and feel that they have a real choice in society, nothing is going to happen in civil rights. It’s not going to happen for Blacks; it’s not going to happen for Mexican Americans; it’s not going to happen for women.

Hernandez served as NOW president until September 1971. Also in 1971 she helped to organize the National Women’s Political Caucus, which encourages women to run for public office and is a forum for women’s issues. However, Hernandez’s relation with NOW became troubled after her tenure as president. She started the Minority Women’s Task Force in 1972, sending out a survey to minority women; the response revealed that only 10 percent of NOW’s membership was made up of minorities, and many minority members felt isolated. Hernandez herself criticized NOW for neglecting minority issues during its focus on promoting the Equal Rights Amendment. She was also unhappy with the paucity of minority representation among the organization’s leadership. In 1979, she severed her connection with NOW, although she later attended its anniversary celebrations.

In 1973, Hernandez chaired the summer meeting in Boston of the International Feminist Planning Conference, bringing together women from thirty countries. At the invitation of the US State Department and the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, in 1975 she attended the International Conference on Minorities and the Metropolis in Bonn, Germany. She traveled to the People’s Republic of China with an American rights group in 1978. That same year, with the National Commission, she made a fact-finding tour of South Africa. The 1981 report of that regional study by the commission, South Africa: Time Running Out, received praise for its analysis of apartheid and US policy in South Africa.

Hernandez continued to build her consulting business, employing four associates and, depending on the project load, as many as thirty staff employees. Specializing in such critical urban issues as transportation, equal opportunity, health, education, economic development, criminal justice, environment, and housing, Aileen C. Hernandez Associates had among its clients United Parcel Service, Standard Oil of California, the National Catholic Conference on Interracial Justice, the Ford Foundation, the Bay Area Rapid Transit District, and the California Department of Health Services.

Hernandez persevered in volunteering her organizational skills. She was vice chair of the National Urban Coalition and of the National Advisory Council of the American Civil Liberties Union, and was chair of Citizen’s Trust, a socially conscious investment group. She served on the Secretary’s Advisory Committee on the Rights and Responsibilities of Women for the US Department of Health and Human Services and worked with the California Women’s Agenda. She was coordinator for Black Women Stirring the Waters and was a board member of the Pesticide Education Center, the National Women’s Museum, the Wellesley Center for Research on Women, the Garden Project, the Meilejohn Civil Liberties Union, the Center for Women Policy Studies, the Center for the Common Good, and the Citizen’s Commission on Civil Rights. She also became a life trustee of the Urban Institute and a member of the Ms. Foundation for Women.

Hernandez continued to travel frequently to attend conferences and teach. In 1993, she was the Tish Sommers lecturer at the Institute for Health and Aging of the University of California, San Francisco; was a Regents Scholar in Residence in 1996 at the University of California, Santa Barbara; and taught at the University of California, Berkeley. In 2000, she was part of a conference encouraging cooperation between women in the United States and China.

The numerous awards in recognition of her public service are impressive. She was chosen as woman of the year in 1961 by the Community Relations Conference of Southern California. Howard University honored her in 1968 for distinguished postgraduate achievement in the fields of labor and public service, and that same year she received the Charter Day Alumni Post Graduate Achievement in Labor and Public Services Award. The San Francisco Examiner named her one of the ten most distinguished women of the San Francisco Bay Area in 1969. The Trinity Baptist Church of San Mateo County presented her the Bicentennial Award in 1976.

Equal rights advocates commended Hernandez in 1981 for her service to the women’s movement, and in 1984 she was honored by the Friends of the San Francisco Commission on the Status of Women. In 1985, the San Francisco League of Women Voters named her among the ten women who make a difference, the National Urban Coalition recognized her service to urban communities, and the San Francisco Black Chamber of Commerce presented her with the Parren J. Mitchell Award for dedicated service to the African American community. The Memorial United Methodist Church commended her services to humanity in 1986, and Gamma Phi Delta Sorority made her an honorary member.

Hernandez also received awards in appreciation from the National Institute for Women of Color in 1987 and, in the following year, from the Western District Conference on the National Association of Negro Business and Professional Women’s Clubs. The Northern California American Civil Liberties Foundation presented her with its Earl Warren Civil Liberties Award in 1989. In 1995, the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association gave her its Silver Spur Award. She received the Eleanor Roosevelt Award from the Democratic Women’s Forum in California in 1996 and the Ella Hill Hutch Award in 1997.

Hernandez died on February 13, 2017, at the age of ninety, in California following complications related to dementia.

Significance

Hernandez’s contributions to labor relations, the women’s movement, antiracism and equal opportunity efforts, political activism, and community service comprise an extensive list of accomplishments. Her dedication to public service made her both a national and an international figure in the forefront of social reform. She was the first African American woman to hold a national office as EEOC commissioner, and she became one of the first active critics of mainstream feminism for its focus on issues affecting mainly white, upper-middle-class women to the detriment of women of color.

Bibliography

Banner, Lois W. Women in Modern America: A Brief History. 2nd ed., Harcourt, 1984.

Barakso, Maryann. Governing NOW: Grassroots Activism in the National Organization for Women. Cornell UP, 2004.

Baxandall, Rosalyn, and Linda Gordon. “Second-Wave Feminism.” A Companion to American Women’s History. Edited by Nancy A. Hewitt, Blackwell, 2002.

Dreyfus, Joel. “Civil Rights and the Women’s Movement.” Black Enterprise, vol. 8, 1977, pp. 35–37.

Lewis, Ida. “Conversation: Ida Lewis and Aileen Hernandez.” Essence, 1971.

Sandomir, Richard. "Aileen Hernandez, 90, Ex-NOW President and Feminist Trailblazer, Dies." The New York Times, 28 Feb. 2017, www.nytimes.com/2017/02/28/us/aileen-hernandez-dead-womens-rights-champion.html. Accessed 3 Apr. 2017.