Читать книгу Eunice Hunton Carter - Marilyn Greenwald - Страница 10

It takes rare courage to fight a fight that more often than not ends in death, poverty or prostitution of genius…. But it is to those who make this fight despite the tremendous odds … that we must look for the breaking of the bonds now linked together by ignorance and misunderstanding.

—Eunice Hunton, in Survey, March 1, 1925

AS SHE SAT IN HER OFFICE at 137 Centre Street in Manhattan in the mid-1930s, few would peg Eunice Hunton Carter as the crime buster whose work would ultimately nail the notorious and glamorous Charles “Lucky” Luciano and many in his gang. As the first Black woman to be named to the prosecutor’s office in New York City, she stood out from the White men in her office, both in physical appearance and demeanor. The low-key Carter, who usually dressed in conservative loose-fitting dresses and often wore a hat, achieved much of her success not on the streets, but behind her desk, working the phones and painstakingly reviewing thousands of documents. Soft-spoken, she didn’t boast about her accomplishments and certainly didn’t exaggerate them. And she never complained about the long hours that often led to many frustrating dead ends.

Eunice was not just another member of the twenty-person team of attorneys who busted the mob and revealed its illegal activities to the public. She was the one who linked prostitution in the city to the work of mob head Luciano, a seemingly far-fetched connection that would ultimately crack the case. Her knowledge of the streets of Harlem, combined with her innate common sense and her willingness to review thousands of pages of legal documents and testimony, led to her discovery. And even then, she had trouble persuading her boss of its importance. She managed to do so only because her colleagues respected her, so they trusted her instincts.

This finding would become Carter’s legacy and would ultimately garner more attention than the many “firsts” she achieved throughout her life: one of the first Black women to earn a law degree at Fordham University and to pass the New York bar, and the first Black person to be awarded an honorary doctorate of law at Smith College, first Black woman to pass the New York Bar, and more. And her association with the glamorous world of Luciano and other mobsters could not have been more ironic for the woman who had always buried herself in solitary work: first as a young college graduate who wrote gentle and descriptive short stories about her vague memories of early childhood in the sunny and lush South, and later as an attorney and bureaucrat who devoted herself to social-justice causes.

As with many people, Eunice’s personality was, in some ways, contradictory. She was a talented writer who gave up hopes of that creative pursuit for social work and the law, and she became a dedicated scholar and dogged attorney for whom family would be one of the most important aspects of her life.

Eunice was a third-generation member of a family of social-justice pioneers who struggled against slavery and segregation and bias. To attempt to understand her persistence, motivations, and way of thinking, one must first turn to her mother, Addie Hunton.

EUNICE SEEMS to have inherited her strong work ethic, single-minded determination, and creative, independent way of thinking from her father, William Alphaeus Hunton. William Hunton was the first top Black YMCA administrator whose pioneering work established YMCA facilities for both “colored” people and Whites. He devoted much of his life to that exceedingly difficult task, traveling around the world and spending many years in the American South during the era of codified segregation known as the Jim Crow years.

But it was her mother, Adelina “Addie” Hunton, who served as the lifelong role model for her two children, Eunice and William Jr. (known as Alphaeus), in her actions, beliefs, and determination. Addie Hunton’s life revolved around her activities as a civil rights and suffrage activist whose goal was to fight for equality and improve the lives of those who followed her. Addie spent much of her early adulthood assisting her husband in his role as a YMCA executive and activist. Throughout her life and her extensive travels, she made sure to record her activities and beliefs on paper. She was a student of the world around her, leaving behind countless writings in the form of books, journal and magazine articles, essays, and newspaper stories. Addie Hunton had a strong sense of history and early on recognized the importance of documenting the struggles—and victories—of Black people in their quest for equality. Her daughter would share this penchant for writing and recording observations, even though she would make her mark in the world as an attorney, crime fighter, and club woman.

IN 1917, ADDIE WAITES HUNTON was a widow with two teenage children: a daughter, Eunice, 18, and a son, Alphaeus, 13. Her husband of twenty-three years had died the previous year after a lengthy illness, and his care had depleted much of the family’s savings and had worn down Addie emotionally. But now she had started to get on her feet again, even though she was never one to remain stationary and tend to the home—not before she married and not as she raised her two children. Now, in the middle of World War I, she and two other Black women used their membership in the National Association of Colored Women (NACW) to contribute to the war effort through rallies, war bond campaigns, and emotional support for Black troops. In their book, Two Colored Women in World War I France, she and Kathryn Johnson described the thrill and apprehension they felt that day in June 1918 when they were called to begin a journey to the coast of France as part of the American Expeditionary Forces. The two women worked for the YMCA and under the auspices of the NACW to sail to France to provide aid and moral support to the two hundred thousand racially segregated Black troops there. The two women were moved by the “great thrilling, throbbing spirit of war.” As they indicate in the detailed memoir about the thirteen-month mission, the excitement and trepidation were palpable—even the weather that day was foreboding:

One dark afternoon, as the rain came down in torrents, the buzz of the telephone at our elbow told us our time had come. We asked no questions, for those were days of deep secrecy, but looked for the last time at the war map in the office wondering where in that war-wrecked country across the Atlantic, we would find our place of service. We breathed a little prayer, said good-bye to our fellow workers, knowing that tomorrow we would be on the ocean eastward bound…. There was no sleep that night for us.

The participation in World War I of Black troops was in itself controversial: while many Blacks at the time advocated resisting military service for a country they believed denied them basic rights, Black media organizations, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and leading intellectuals of the era, including prominent author and scholar W. E. B. Du Bois, advocated their participation in the military, believing that such service could ultimately alleviate the racial prejudice in the United States. The 92nd Division—composed of draftees and officers—and the 93rd Division—made up primarily of National Guard units—were created for Black Americans. Yet most Black soldiers were assigned to service units, based on the belief that Blacks were more suited for manual labor than combat. And, initially, only a dozen or so Black women were recruited to work with the four hundred thousand Black soldiers in Europe. Addie was sent first to a supply center in St. Nazaire, and later to the town of Aix-les-Bains in the southeast of France.

Hunton’s and Johnson’s 1921 memoir about their shocking, dramatic, and fulfilling time in France was the first of two full-length books Hunton wrote about her and her husband’s lives. Both books differ in style from what many readers would characterize as conventional memoirs because they overflow with primary source material that includes poems, letters, and memos and, in the case of Two Colored Women, written summaries of real-time conversations and excerpts of Hunton’s own thoughts of events shortly after they happened. Hunton apparently realized that because of the marginalization of Blacks of her era, direct accounts of experiences and thoughts would likely be overlooked and lost to history if they were not documented in detail as they happened. Ironically, in the foreword to Two Colored Women, Hunton and Johnson own up to the idea that their own opinions and emotions about their time in France may be biased in some ways due to their unbridled admiration and respect for the soldiers with whom they worked: “We have not refrained in our story from a large measure of loyalty and patriotic service, performed oftentimes under the most trying conditions.” Still, they say modestly that “we have no desire to attain to an authentic history but have rather aimed to record our impressions and facts in a simple way.” Yet Hunton and Johnson’s account of their time in France during World War I is a history that vividly recounts the struggles of a disenfranchised group who fought for their country but ultimately were let down by the government they supported. As the women imply in their book, their time in France was fulfilling to them but also became a disillusioning experience that prompted them to redouble their efforts on fairness and justice after they returned to the United States.

AS YMCA PROGRAM DIRECTORS, known as secretaries, Hunton and Johnson were tasked with teaching literacy classes, running kitchens, leading Bible study classes, arranging athletic events, and, in general, providing moral and emotional support to the Black troops stationed at or near the Western Front. In Two Colored Women, they describe in detail their exhaustive but rewarding months in these efforts. But the mistreatment, neglect, and general lack of humane treatment of the Black soldiers on the part of the American Command as well as YMCA officials shocked them, leading them to believe that America’s Jim Crow laws extended informally to France. Further, although the YMCA pledged equal treatment of the Black soldiers, the women were spread thin, and, at one point, three women were responsible for aiding one hundred fifty thousand men. (The YMCA ultimately sent a total of eighty-five Black social workers to France to aid in the war effort.) The terrible treatment of Black soldiers overseas enraged Blacks in the states and, for many, erased any optimism that their service in the military could ultimately alleviate racism back home. In an essay published in the NAACP journal, The Crisis, which was devoted to Black troops in World War I, Du Bois wrote that the lack of more Black welfare workers like Hunton and Johnson was intentional and designed to demoralize them so they would return home. What Du Bois did not know at the time was that Hunton and Johnson, as well as Helen Curtis and two other Black YMCA workers in France, were being investigated during their trip by Military Intelligence and the National War Work Council of the YMCA after an American heard Curtis urging Black soldiers to protest their abysmal circumstances. Investigators allowed the worker to stay overseas but urged the YMCA not to send any similar “radicals” to France.

Addie Hunton was no babe in the woods when it came to the realities of discrimination, nor was she easily deterred. A native of Norfolk, Virginia, she had traveled extensively and had spent much of her life in the South. Johnson, a field agent for the NAACP in New Orleans, also was a seasoned traveler and social worker. But the two were taken aback by what they saw in France, and they recount throughout the book individual cases of harassment of Black soldiers, inadequate housing, and propaganda by military officials about the supposed cowardice of Black soldiers. The women were quick to praise the work of some of the YMCA officials who came to France, but they also noted that many of them exhibited racist behavior. They describe an all-too-typical instance when an all-Black band led by a white bandleader came to a hut to entertain the soldiers: “Several colored soldiers followed the band into the hut. The secretary got up and announced that no colored men would be admitted.” Signs prohibiting Black soldiers from entering some areas were common, the women write, as were recommendations by American officers that the French prohibit Black soldiers from entering hotels and restaurants for fear they would interact with White women. To show Black soldiers common courtesy, some officers indicated, “not only would be dangerous, but … would be an insult to the American people.” Ironically, the French, for the most part, respected and admired the Black soldiers and treated them warmly. “The relationship between the colored soldiers, the colored welfare workers, and the French people was most cordial and friendly and grew in sympathy and understanding, as their association brought about a closer acquaintance,” the women write. That warm treatment was in direct contrast to what many of them experienced in their home country: “It was rather an unusual as well as a most welcome experience to be able to go into places of public accommodation without having any hesitations or misgivings; to be at liberty to take a seat in a common carrier, without fear of inviting some humiliating experience; to go into a home and receive a greeting that carried with it a hospitality and kindliness of spirit that could not be questioned.”

Even the Germans recognized this irony: In August 1918, they dropped leaflets over the 367th Infantry in the 92nd Division, suggesting they “come over to the German lines.” “Do you enjoy the same rights as white people do in America, the land of Freedom and Democracy, or are you treated over there as second-class citizens?” the leaflet said, asking, sarcastically, if the Black soldiers can go into restaurants “where white people dine” or “get a seat in [a] theater where white people sit” or “get a seat or a berth in a railroad car,” or “can you even ride, in the South, in the same street car with white people?” The leaflets were brutally candid: “You have been made the tool of the egotistic and rapacious rich in America, and there is nothing in the whole game for you but broken bones, horrible wounds, spoiled health, or death. No satisfaction whatever will you get out of this unjust war.”

That the soldiers would be treated with more respect and hospitality in a foreign country than in their own was, of course, noted throughout Two Colored Women. “There was being developed in France a racial consciousness and racial strength that could not have been gained in a half century of normal living in America,” they write. “Over the canteen in France we learned to know that our young manhood was the natural and struggling guardian of our struggling race. Learning all this and more, we learned to love our men better than ever before.”

Hunton and Johnson became maternal figures to the Black soldiers they met, and many of the anecdotes in the book convey the warmth and camaraderie among them. They worked to make huts and living quarters as hospitable as possible and were quick to note that their generosity was returned. “We learned to know our own men as we had not known them before, and this knowledge makes large our faith in them,” they write. The men reminisced about the women they left at home and had “an attitude of deep respect, often bordering on worship” toward Hunton and Johnson. The two note the joy many of the soldiers took through the “salvation” of music: “Those who know the native love and ability of our race for music will not marvel at the statement that colored soldiers sang, whistled, and played their way through the late war” and through days of “hunger and thirst … deathly fatigue … days filled with dense smoke and deafening uproar of battle; days when terrible discriminations and prejudices ate into the soul deeper than the oppressors knew.”

The end of the war did not ease the discrimination and ill-treatment of the Black soldiers, Hunton and Johnson imply: Black soldiers were not permitted to participate in a victory parade in France, even though many had been cited or decorated for bravery. The French did not understand the reasons, but “they gradually discovered that the colored man was not the wild, vicious character that he had been represented to be, but that he was kind-hearted, genteel and polite.”

The women’s trip home from France during the humid August of 1919 may have been emblematic of what they found when they reached American shores: Hunton, Johnson, Curtis, and sixteen Black nurses were housed in poorly ventilated second-class cabins on a deck below White nurses and secretaries making the same trip. When they asked why the assignments were segregated, they were told that some of the workers on the ship would be insulted to have Black people in the same dining room where they ate. But Hunton and Johnson focused on their work and were not sidetracked by the kind of treatment they could have predicted. Their response was to meticulously record their experiences and hope they would one day become public. Yet the two women seem oddly optimistic at the end of Two Colored Women, as they write that the war experience of the Black soldiers demonstrated what their lives could be like in their home country: “Thousands had a contact and association [with the French people] which resulted in bringing for the entire number a broader view of life; they caught the vision of a freedom that gave them new hope and new inspiration…. Some of them received the rudiments of an education through direct instruction; a thing that would not have come to them in all the years of a lifetime at home.”

Hunton and Johnson write eloquently of the importance of culture and beauty—even during an era of war and hatred: “Many hundreds had the opportunity of traveling through the flowering fields of a country long famed for its love of the beautiful, and seeing its wonderful monuments, cathedrals, art galleries, places, chateaux that represent the highest attainment in the world of architecture and art.” And, perhaps even more important to these soldiers, “While they traveled they learned that there is a fair-skinned people in the world who believe in the equality of races, and who practice what they believe,” the women write. “They also had an opportunity to give the truth a hearing before … the civilized world; the truth with regard to their conduct, their mental capacity, their God-given talents, and their ability for the leadership of men.” What the men gained, Hunton and Johnson write, “[was] quite enough to offset whatever came to them of hardship and sacrifice, of war and suffering, of mean prejudice and subtle propaganda, of misrepresentation and glaring injustice.”

Johnson and Hunton wrote Two Colored Women to quickly get on the record the first-person accounts of what they viewed as history in the making. But their motives may have also been a bit slyer than that. The advent of Plessy v. Ferguson, the 1896 Supreme Court decision that essentially codified the concept of “separate but equal” treatment in public facilities, in many ways legalized discrimination, declaring that Fourteenth Amendment protections—granting citizenship to all people born in the United States—applied to political and civil rights, but not social rights. In her book about the activism of Black women in the early and mid-twentieth century, Nikki Brown writes, “[The women] critiqued Jim Crow in an international context as race women and cultural ambassadors. Few African Americans utilized an international forum to debate American race relations…. [They] became both commentators and critiquers of white supremacy and racial discrimination in the United States. Hoping for widespread embarrassment with an international condemnation of Jim Crow, they essentially asked, how can America treat her loyal blacks this way?”

The terrible treatment of the Black soldiers in France by their own countrymen drove home to many of them the virulence and ubiquity of racial prejudice. In fact, the success of the program in which Hunton and Johnson participated may have been threatening to some Americans because it succeeded, sociologist Susan Kerr Chandler wrote decades later: “The program stood out as a fundamental challenge to the maintenance of a system of white supremacy, and white YMCA leaders were deeply threatened by it and by the growing racial pride that would in time challenge the segregated basis of social services.” To W. E. B. Du Bois, who had initially encouraged Black participation in the war, the racism displayed overseas may have exacerbated the divisions between Blacks and Whites: “This war has disillusioned millions of fighting white men—disillusioned them with its frank truth of dirt, disease, cold, wet and discomfort; maiming and hatred. But the disillusion of Negro American troops was more than this, or rather it was this and more—the flat, frank realization that however high the ideas of America or however noble her tasks, her great duty as conceived by an astonishing number of able men, brave and good, as well as of other sorts of men, is to hate ‘niggers.’”

Still, Du Bois believed that patriotism was a value that could not be diluted; he maintained that Black soldiers did not regret their service to a nation that treated them so poorly: “There is not a black soldier but who is glad he went—glad to fight for France, the only real white Democracy; glad to have a new, clear vision of the real, inner spirit of American prejudice. The day of camouflage is past.”

HUNTON AND JOHNSON RETURNED to a country where racism and inequality were intensifying, but the advent of World War I marked a turning point of sorts in Black history, coinciding with the Great Migration—the mass movement between 1914 and 1920 of nearly half a million Black southerners to large Northern cities, including Chicago, New York, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and Detroit. In addition to the injustices brought about by the brutal and oppressive Jim Crow legislation in the South, a boll weevil infestation at the time that ruined crops threatened the livelihood of the many laborers, sharecroppers, and farmers who already lived in extreme poverty. Meanwhile, as industry grew in the North and the war led to a reduction of European immigrant labor, northern businesses increasingly turned to Black southern workers. The Great Migration turned into a social movement, with influential Black leaders and the Black newspaper the Chicago Defender urging Black people to leave the South for a new life in the North. Testimonials and correspondence by those who made the move triggered others to do the same. Informal networks of family and friends were organized to facilitate the moves.

Even before her experiences in France, Addie Hunton had traveled widely, and her parents instilled in her a sense of patriotism and optimism that she could do anything she put her mind to. Born in Norfolk in 1866—although her exact birth date remains somewhat of a mystery and is on her tombstone as 1875—to Jesse and Adelina Lawton Waites, she was the oldest of their two daughters and a son. Her mother, Adelina Lawton, was born in 1845 in Beaufort, South Carolina, to enslaved parents who named her after the White daughter of her owners. Jesse Waites, who moved to Norfolk with his wife shortly after the Civil War, had been a porter, a retail worker, and, ultimately, the owner of a successful wholesale oyster and shipping company. The Waites family belonged to the African Methodist Episcopal Church and were avid churchgoers. Adelina Waites died when Addie was a teenager, and she was sent to Boston to be raised by a maternal aunt. Addie completed high school at Boston Latin School, and then went to Spencerian College of Commerce in Philadelphia, where she became the first Black person to graduate. By this time, Addie had already traveled overseas to Western Europe and had become fluent in French and German. She taught school briefly in Portsmouth, Virginia, and then became a principal at State Normal and Agricultural College in Alabama.

Interestingly, in all of Addie Hunton’s writings about her life and experiences, she focuses little on her personal life. In an extensive biography of her husband, William Alphaeus Hunton: A Pioneer Prophet of Young Men, she delves into great detail about the life, contributions, and sacrifices of her husband, including much information about how she dedicated a portion of her life to help him in his struggle to extend YMCA services to Black Americans. It was a position that allowed them both to travel around the world, but one that required great sacrifices. Other than passing references and in a poignant section of the book outlining the last few years of Hunton’s life, she writes little about herself or her family. For instance, after four chapters describing William Hunton’s early life—including a brief biography of his father, Stanton Hunton, a former slave who bought his freedom—she mentions in passing that she began her decades of helping him in 1891, the year after they first met. William Hunton had been living in Norfolk, and Addie was still working in Alabama when Addie’s father introduced them. The year 1891 had been a turning point in both their lives, she said, because William was the first Black person to be named a secretary of the International Committee of the YMCA, and it was the year they met. “From 1891 to 1898 he worked continuously with a steady surveillance, a keen watchfulness and an unabated ardor, also necessary in the first steps taken in any worth-while cause,” she writes. “From this period until his death [in 1916] I had the privilege of a most intimate touch with him in his work and I knew how earnestly he labored.” She recounts very briefly the story of their initial meeting. Jesse Waites, who had been an early supporter of William’s work with the YMCA, told him that his daughter, Addie, had planned to travel from her home in Normal, Alabama, to Wilberforce University in southern Ohio to visit her sister. William told Jesse that he hoped to head to his home country of Canada during the same period that Addie had planned her trip. He offered to accompany Addie from Alabama to Xenia, Ohio, “as girls rarely traveled alone at that time,” Addie writes. “My father was glad to accept his offer, and thus began the friendship that resulted in our marriage.” Before their marriage in 1893, the two had embarked on a two-year long-distance romantic relationship. Addie had been working in Alabama, and while William spent much of his time in Norfolk, his travels took him around the South and as far north as his hometown of Chatham, Ontario. (Interestingly, Addie quotes his letters to her extensively in her book, but relates little about the content of her letters to him). Those years were tough, Addie writes—and not only because the two were physically separated. At this point in his life, Addie implies the Canadian-born and well-educated William was still somewhat naïve when it came to race relations in the United States and particularly in the South. When he first moved from Ottawa to Norfolk, for instance, he might have experienced a bit of culture shock: “Coming from the environment of Ottawa to that of Norfolk was much like being transferred from the charm and advantages of a great university to a humble rural school,” Addie writes. It would be wrong to say that racism did not exist in the Canadian cities where William had lived, but it had not been codified into law as it had in the American South, and race riots there were unheard of. Still, in Norfolk, he had not experienced the virulent racism he would experience in the deep South later in his career. “At Norfolk he had, comparatively speaking, felt but slightly the shock of segregation and its attendant evils,” she writes. “Street cars and railroads in the state had not yet come to have their infamous ‘Jim Crow’ laws.” One of his first tastes of the prejudice he would soon experience came as he boarded a small train headed from Norfolk to Portsmouth—accommodations were the same, Addie writes, but separate sides were used by Black and White patrons. At that time, she adds, railroad cars were not required by law to segregate the races.

IT WAS FATE that united Addie Waites and William Alphaeus Hunton. The two were raised in two different countries—and under different financial and social circumstances. Hunton was the sixth of nine children born in 1863 to Mary Ann Conyer and Stanton Hunton, a former slave who managed to purchase himself and move from Virginia to a small town in Southwestern Ontario called Chatham, an enclave where many former slaves had gathered in the mid- and late nineteenth century. Chatham was a rich agricultural district that had been settled in 1830, and it grew rapidly. The little river that flowed through it, named Escunispe by the Indians, was later called the Thames in homage to the British homeland, Addie writes. Interestingly, the residents of Chatham, many of whom came from the United States, apparently chose to honor Great Britain, perhaps because federal law at the time made it dangerous for even freed slaves to travel in the United States, forcing the Underground Railroad to find a direct route across the border to Canada; Chatham was a stop on the route.

As the daughter of a successful businessman, Addie wanted for little growing up. William Hunton loved his life growing up in the small, close-knit community of Chatham and had hardly any desire or opportunity to leave Canada. But these two people who lived on opposite sides of the North American continent also had much in common: a love of learning, a strong spiritual leaning, and the ability and desire to work hard—qualities that had been instilled in them by their fathers. (Both Addie and William had mothers who died when they were young. William and his siblings were raised primarily by their father.) Each also had a love of and talent for writing, a pastime that would sustain them throughout their lives and allow them to leave behind vital records of their experiences and of the historical times in which they lived.

In her extensive research into the Hunton family, Christine Lutz examines three generations of Huntons in relation to their devotion to Pan-Africanism, an ideology of Black political, cultural, and intellectual thought that centers around the belief that a brotherhood of African people around the world share a common history and destiny. This sense of shared identity, defined by Pan-Africanism in the early twentieth century, was the focus of several major conferences held around the world. Lutz maintains that the concept of Pan-Africanism in the Hunton family originated with Stanton Hunton, and was carried on through the work of Addie and William Hunton and then by their children, Eunice and Alphaeus. It was this sense of mission and shared identity that attracted Addie Waites to William Hutton. And, ultimately, they became part of a network of activists around the world who worked to reverse the ill effects of the slave trade and colonialism and to counter discrimination.

The two shared yet another value: religion. Addie was raised in a devout African Methodist Episcopal household, and William’s spirituality was one of his most distinctive lifelong traits, and he raised his own children as Episcopalians. During much of his childhood and adolescence, William had been a devout Christian and member of the British Methodist Episcopal church, and he infused his decades-long YMCA work with a strong Christian component. William taught Sunday school as an adolescent, continued to teach Bible school classes for most of his adult life, and carried a Bible with him at all times. After his graduation from Wilberforce Institute of Ontario in 1883, he took a job teaching public school in Dresden, Ontario—even though he hadn’t planned to make teaching his permanent vocation. After two years of teaching, he passed a government exam and was named a clerk in the Canadian Department of Indian Affairs in Ottawa. It was in Ottawa where his life took a dramatic and fateful turn: he became an active member of the Ottawa YMCA and took an interest in that organization’s attempts to serve Blacks. As Addie described it, his life in Ottawa and his activities with the YMCA were extremely fulfilling to him. He established at the YMCA facility a Bible Study group, choral society, debating group, and a library. Still, she writes, something was missing from his life: “In many respects, it was the most ideally satisfying period of his life. And yet he was not completely satisfied there. He still longed for the service that would answer his soul’s chief desire to be altogether used by the Master for the spread of his kingdom here on earth.” After three years working as a Canadian civil servant, William’s dream would be fulfilled, Addie writes, although at first he was ambivalent about his choices. In 1888, the YMCA’s record in equality was decidedly mixed. Its self-described mission—to encourage Christian brotherhood—apparently did not always extend to Blacks, who could be denied membership at local facilities. The YMCA was founded in London in 1844 by George Williams, a twenty-two-year-old department store worker who was troubled by the negative influences and poverty among young men that he saw in industrialized London. He believed that a gathering place for them would fulfill a social need and provide a haven for men of all social classes. The YMCA in the United States opened in Boston eight years later, when retired sea captain Thomas Valentine Sullivan noticed a similar need for a safe haven for sailors and merchants. As Nina Mjagkij notes in her extensive history of the relationship between the YMCA and Black citizens, during much of the first century of its existence, the YMCA followed the lead of the United States in its treatment of Blacks. Anthony Bowen, a freed slave, established the first YMCA for Blacks in Washington, DC, in 1853, but until the late 1880s, little if anything had been done by the YMCA to serve them. By then, the YMCA had begun to encourage Blacks to form their own “separate but equal” associations, a push that Blacks embraced. International Secretary Henry Edwards, a former abolitionist, determined that the best way to do this was to visit Black colleges and universities in the South to introduce students to the YMCA in hopes that they would continue their association with it throughout their lives. It was a strategy that would pay off in the short run and prove effective for decades to come. H. E. Brown, the YMCA official who was in charge of recruiting Blacks to the organization, had become aware of William’s participation in the Ottawa YMCA—which at the time had few Black members—and recommended William be hired as the organization’s first Black secretary. The naming of William Hunton would prove to be one of the key appointments in the YMCAs early history; it not only indicated that the organization was serious about serving Blacks, but it ultimately launched the efforts of an innovative and tireless leader whose work would indirectly shape the direction of the YMCA for years to come.

Initially, William’s main job was to transfer the primarily Black YMCA in Norfolk, Virginia, from White to Black leadership. Although he may not have realized it at the time, William, who was then twenty-five, was well-suited for that job, which required enthusiasm, determination, and a smooth manner: “He was handsome, cultured, and very definitely earnest,” Addie writes of her future husband. And, indeed, the tall, lanky William was always impeccably dressed and elegant with his open face and downward curving mustache. But low salary was very nearly a stumbling block when it came to the job switch: while Brown had finally persuaded the International Committee of the YMCA to devote funds to encourage Black leadership in local YMCAs, much of its funding was still contingent on donations. William was torn about whether to take the job, which paid $800 a year (the equivalent of about $22,500 in 2020)—less than what he was earning in his government job, and certainly not as secure a job in the long term, he believed. And it would, of course, require him to leave his home country to travel extensively in the United States—especially the South. But ultimately, he decided it would be “God’s will finding fulfillment in the life of the Young Men’s Christian Association and in the life of this pioneer prophet,” Addie writes. (W. E. B. Du Bois once referred to William as a “pioneer prophet of young men,” the appellation Addie used in the title of her biography of her husband.)

Those with whom he worked were shocked and saddened when he said he was leaving them—and so confident that he would return home soon that they refused his resignation and instead granted him a leave of absence. “I really had no choice,” he said. “It was God’s leading and I could but follow.” William would never return to Canada to live, and would stay at his first posting in Norfolk for three years. After that, he became a true citizen of the world who would eventually spend most of the rest of his life traveling the globe.

ADDIE HUNTON WROTE her biography of her husband in 1938, twenty-two years after his death at age fifty-three. “Wherever I have moved since his ‘Great Adventure,’ there has been an insistent demand that the facts of his life be recorded for authentic future reference,” she wrote. Addie insists, however, that despite their intense love for each other, her intent in writing the biography was not to focus on their marriage or family but on William Hunton’s enduring accomplishments as an activist, executive, and role model. “I had [in writing the book] to adjust myself for the very difficult task of evaluating Mr. Hunton impersonally as a man rather than as a devoted husband and comrade for many years,” she wrote. “It was necessary to come to the realization of the fact that his value to his times and to posterity was not merely in the undisputed fineness of his character … but more exactly in his permanent influence through the great movement with which he was long associated.” Both Eunice and her brother, Alphaeus, inherited from both their parents their lifelong dedication to equality and to what they perceived as their mission to help society and encourage similar generations to do the same. It is apparent through their activities, their writings, and their longtime associations that seeking publicity or kudos for their work was not of great importance to them. Instead, as Alphaeus wrote as an adult, their most important task was long-term effectiveness of their work and the importance of others to carry it on: “Men die, but their ideas and movements live on. We who carry on the struggle are the heirs to those who went before us.”

It was apparently this philosophy that led the Huntons to play the role of historians or chroniclers of the times. In the years before she began writing her book about William, Addie wrote: “I have re-read hundreds of letters that had their beginning three years before our marriage that continued twenty years after…. They are very precious documents…. They are very human, and in them I have found revealed, with an intimacy unequaled elsewhere in his writings—the heart throbs, the patience, the dauntless courage of a crusader.”

Both Addie and William were eloquent and graceful writers; William, also, was an eloquent and persuasive speaker—a talent that contributed to his success as a YMCA executive and crusader. Addie quotes at length his speeches, and notes throughout A Pioneer Prophet the care and time he took when writing each one.

To Addie, William (or “Mr. Hunton,” as she refers to him throughout the biography) was almost Christ-like, and indeed those with whom he worked used similar analogies when they spoke about him. (In a memorial speech, his friend and coworker Jesse Moorland said that when he left home to take the job with the YMCA, “He took upon himself, like his Master, the form of a servant in Jim Crow Country…. His whole soul revolted at times … yet he summoned his courage, he took counsel with God, and persisted on at the end to die a martyr to these conditions.”) Before the two were married, Addie wrote, he seemed so different from other men his age “in his general manners and his earnestness of purpose that [her] girlfriends used to say that [she] might see him depart much in the way that Elijah had disappeared from the earth.” During his first few years as a YMCA secretary, he barely discussed the loneliness, discomforts, and indignities he experienced while traveling, in part, she speculates, because he found solace in his faith. “In all the intimate years of our life, he made no comment on the hardships and loneliness of that period [the late 1880s and early 1890s]…. When questioned about it, he would laughingly reply, ‘It was all in the day’s work.’” William Hunton endured buggy rides in torrential downpours; rides in freight cars; rail delays that meant he could not eat for a day; and, once in rural Mississippi, travel in an ox cart. But the ever-optimistic William always sought the bright side: “I had traveled a hundred and twenty miles in three rains, two hacks and a bus, with cheese and ginger wafers as my only rations,” he wrote Addie from Jefferson City, Missouri. “I did finally reach here and slept well in a comfortable bed.” He rarely mentioned the indignities he suffered traveling in the deep South, but occasionally would allude to them. In one letter to Addie, he wrote, “You and I will travel together as little possible in the far South. I can endure many things myself for the work’s sake…. But I am sure it would go infinitely harder if we together were subjected to indignities. But never mind, we’ll not borrow trouble.” Addie and her husband did travel together periodically early in their marriage, including one trip between Birmingham and Decatur, when William persuaded a train conductor to allow them to remain in a Pullman car even though they were Black. At the time, they were traveling with their baby, who soon died. “When we were taking our dying baby northward to Asheville, [William’s] quiet determination again won…. Justice, humane conditions and enlightened thought were pathetically, tragically missing. But he was never bitter.”

The three years he spent in Norfolk establishing YMCA facilities for Blacks were an unqualified success; as it turned out, William Hunton and the YMCA were a good fit. He also worked at facilities in Washington, Richmond, and Baltimore, helping to establish literary and debating societies, choral clubs, athletic activities, and educational classes, all against the backdrop of what he referred to as “practical Christianity.” After his first year on the job, Brown proclaimed his appointment such a success that he recommended that the organization seek out more Black men in the South to train as leaders in the YMCA—a task that he undertook himself. Ironically, William did such a good job that he eventually replaced Brown, his mentor. In 1891, Brown had become ill and could no longer travel extensively. William was named to succeed him as secretary of the staff of the International Committee. He was now the first Black secretary to engage in supervisory work in the YMCA organization. Addie saw the promotion as a turning point in her husband’s life, but it would prove a blessing and a curse for the couple. It was a fulfilling position that ultimately allowed him, in the short run, to help improve the lives of thousands of Black youths and, in the long run, many more, but it would take a toll first on his family life and, ultimately, on his physical well-being.

ADDIE HUNTON ACKNOWLEDGES that William’s tenure in Norfolk was probably meant to test his fitness as YMCA director, and to determine if he could overcome the physical and emotional hardships of a job that required him to work in the South in the Jim Crow era, and to establish facilities for Blacks in an environment of overt racism. When Addie and William married in 1893, he was in the midst of a job that had required him to travel throughout the southern and northeastern portion of the country to oversee the establishment of more facilities for Blacks. At times, Addie traveled with her husband, she writes, helping him with secretarial work, editing some of his writings, and “looking after details and advising and inspiring him.” It was through this work that she said she learned about his character and source of strength: “He had the habit of serenity that could not be easily disturbed…. He also had a faith to the end of his life that reality, however crude or even cruel, could by patient effort be somehow lifted to the realm of idealism…. He had the faculty of making other men feel this faith of his…. He spurned narrowness and pettiness.” But she also acknowledges that he enjoyed solitude even when he was at home with his family. William’s travel schedule was a brutal one; letters he wrote to Addie and Moorland indicate that during a normal month, he would travel to four or five cities, spending four to five days in each one. Also typical is his description in a letter to Moorland that “It’s nearly 10 p.m. and I have been at it since six this a.m. Hence this scrawling.”

Shortly after their marriage, William was given one of the YMCA’s greatest honors: he was named to the American delegation to the Gold Jubilee of the YMCA in London. It was after this conference that William’s career and reputation soared, and he was seen as one of the top leaders of the YMCA, responsible for helping to launch “colored” facilities across the United States. But it was shortly after this time that the relationship between the Huntons was conducted largely through correspondence, because he was rarely home. But his almost-daily letters to his Addie, and later to his family, were extensive and detailed. She describes one in particular when he returned triumphantly in 1898 for a visit to his beloved Ottawa: “There was unbounded joy” on the part of his friends, who gave him “a triumphal entry because he had conquered the unknown and returned as their brave warrior.”

William seems uncharacteristically jubilant and almost giddy. In many other letters to Addie, his enthusiasm is directed largely toward his work; this letter focuses on his friends and the region as a source of happiness. And it also reveals that despite his success in the United States—and his stoicism about racism there—he missed the color blindness of his Canadian compatriots. As he wrote, “I am here. It is like a dream. I know of no place that I would rather live.” After what he considered a royal welcome by friends and officials of the local YMCA, he and a friend attended a session of the Canadian House of Commons: “I presume that a talk about the colored people as a class is not heard in Parliament once in two or three years. Sweetheart, I wish you were here to see how different these people are from many white people we know.” William, of course, would not be the only one in the family to feel more welcome as a Black person outside the United States than in it. During her trip to France with the Expeditionary Forces, Addie made it clear that she and the Black soldiers did not experience the cruel prejudice there that they felt in their own country. William would maintain his love for his native Canada throughout his life even though he never carried out a plan to bring his family there for a visit, Addie said: “A visit to Ottawa together was one of the unfulfilled dreams of our united life.”

DURING THE LAST DECADE or so of his life, William wrote hundreds of letters to Addie. Still, one of his closest friends and colleagues was Jesse Moorland, a former minister who became a secretary, fundraiser, and administrator in the Colored Men’s Department of the YMCA. Moorland had joined the YMCA administration in 1892 and became a secretary in the Colored Men’s Department in 1896, when he became William’s partner—and ultimately his closest confidante, even though the men were based in different cities, with William in Atlanta—and later Brooklyn—and Moorland in Washington, DC. It is fair to say that his work with Moorland had a profound effect on William’s life and career, and the men developed a deep professional and personal bond. William expressed many of his inner thoughts to Moorland by letter, including the great weariness he felt during some of his travels, brought on by overwork and the continual degradation of segregation and racism. Interestingly, about the only times the two men were together was at conferences and YMCA-related conventions. William’s letters indicate that Moorland came to the Hunton home in times of need—for instance, when the Huntons moved from Richmond to Atlanta and during William’s severe and ultimately fatal illness. (Addie and Moorland’s lives would intersect again after William’s death when Addie traveled to France to help Black soldiers during the war. Moorland, at the time, worked through the YMCA with the Department of Colored Troops to coordinate the program in which Addie and Kathryn Johnson participated.) Moorland was a tireless worker and organizer who contributed greatly to William’s success with the YMCA; among many other accomplishments, they recruited Black students from the South to staff YMCA missions in Africa. One of the most notable and enduring achievements of the two men was securing a contribution in 1910 by Chicago businessman and philanthropist Julius Rosenwald, the founder of Sears, Roebuck and Co., who pledged $25,000 toward the cost of a YMCA building in any city that could raise $75,000 on its own. ($25,000 in 1910 would be worth about $706,000 in 2020). The two used the pledge as a springboard to begin a campaign that would ultimately raise thousands of dollars and launch thirteen YMCA facilities. (William, over the years, had established an international presence with the YMCA. He had been selected to give an address at its 1907 World Student Christian Federation conference in Tokyo, and he later traveled from there across Asia.)

The hundreds of letters William wrote to his friend Moorland during the two decades they worked together show a powerful bond between the men. William’s salutation of “My dear Brother Moorland”—a standard greeting—could be taken literally. Although those letters discuss mostly travel schedules and other YMCA business, many of them touch on William’s home life, his thoughts while on the road, and other intimate issues. Based on Addie’s written recollections of her husband and these letters, William was not an emotional person, and his passion manifested itself primarily when he spoke of God and his faith. To Moorland, however, he often tiptoed around key happenings in his life; his letters, while personal, were somewhat formal. For instance, he refers to Addie in them as “Mrs. H,” and in his constant invitations for Moorland to visit his family in Atlanta, he refers to Moorland’s wife as “Mrs. Moorland.” He mentions his children occasionally, often summing up their activities in a sentence. Poignantly, in one letter, he talks about his second-born baby, William, who later died in infancy: “You would laugh to see our baby kicking and rolling all over the floor and begging me to take him. Just like his father, you know.” He later writes about the death of that baby in two sentences: After telling him about the death of his brother in October 1896, “a heavier blow came to us in May when it pleased the Lord to take away our sweet baby also. O Moorland, I cannot tell you about it. The other world is far more real to me now than formerly.” He ends this note mentioning the solace he takes from Moorland’s friendship: “How I would enjoy having a long talk with you. I thank the Lord for the bonds of real friendship which unites us.”

Three years later, William also shares with Moorland some good news: his great joy in the birth of Eunice, even though his letters indicate that he had not mentioned Addie was pregnant until a month before the birth: “I must tell you a secret. We are daily expecting a ‘newcomer.’ But Mrs. Hunton’s weakness gives us great anxiety.” In a letter to Moorland four days after the birth of Eunice on July 16, 1899, he wrote, “You will be pleased to learn that I have an heiress, born early Sunday morning. Mother and daughter are doing nicely. Of course we are very proud.” As Eunice grew, he occasionally mentioned her temperament and health: when she was one, for instance, she had a temperature of 103, but soon recuperated. “Glad at the prospect of seeing you,” William told Moorland, apparently in reference to an upcoming conference. “But very sorry to have to leave my little family.”

It is unknown whether Moorland shared William’s religious devotion. Although Moorland makes occasional references to his spirituality, William’s references to God and his own “mission” are mentioned much more frequently. William’s devout Christianity played only a minor role in his YMCA duties. When he and Moorland recruited Black secretaries, they required applicants to belong to the Protestant church, but otherwise stressed inter-denominationalism in all other aspects of the organization. They were careful not to step on the toes of local clergy and assured them that the YMCA was not “competing” with local churches. They knew community support and donations depended on the idea that they favored no specific denomination.

Of course, it could be said that the success of Hunton and Moorland in finding Black leaders and in encouraging the growth of Black YMCA facilities cut both ways. Some critics, including Du Bois, felt that YMCA policy indirectly encouraged segregation, both within the YMCA’s own organization and in the country. Even Rosenwald’s donation drew the ire of Du Bois, who felt that the money would be better spent to combat YMCA policy that permitted the exclusion of Blacks in some facilities. William had made peace with the idea that instead of direct confrontation, the way to help overturn the nation’s racist environment was through self-help. That meant the organization would continue to focus on employing top Black leaders to carry out the mission of the YMCA and to reach disenfranchised and poor Blacks. He had even taken steps throughout his tenure as secretary to strengthen ties among Black YMCA facilities through the regional conferences and the launching of a monthly newspaper, the Messenger. Earlier in his career, he had argued that by being complicit with the prevailing unchristian terrain, the YMCA was an institution that indirectly sanctioned it—but he had come to change his mind about a strategy that he felt would ultimately benefit Black citizens.

Despite his professional success and the subsequent recognition by YMCA officials of his efforts, all was not well within the Hunton family. Christine Lutz notes that while they made sure to save money for the education of their two children, a lack of money and overspending had long been an issue for the family, and they sometimes received financial help from Moorland in the form of loans, a phenomenon that angered Addie, as she had maintained a cool relationship with Moorland. Further, the seemingly robust William often hid the fact that he periodically suffered from various ailments, including colitis, malaria, and respiratory problems. And throughout their marriage, they suffered through the deaths of many relatives, including three of William’s siblings—Robert, Augustus, and Stanton—and Addie’s beloved father, Jesse Waites. More devastating, however, were the deaths of two of their children who died as babies before Eunice and Alphaeus were born. Their first child, Bernice, died in 1895, and baby William died a year later. In the 1890s, “death stalked us for several years,” Addie wrote. William dealt with his grief through poetry: he wrote one poem after the death of Jesse Waites and another after the death of his infant son. He sent the latter to Addie while he was traveling:

Lo, eyes were made for the light

And souls were made for joy.

But eyes must be blinded by the night,

And souls must be burdened by grief.

That alike they may find relief,

Relief from the strain of the light

and strength from the strain of joy.

Addie mentions the existence of these two infants only twice in her biography: when she quotes her husband’s poem, and, earlier, when she quotes a letter in which he mentions their son, the infant William, during his joyful visit to Ottawa.

In an uncharacteristically emotional passage, Addie Hunton writes of another terrible twist of fate during the late 1890s—it happened a few months before the birth of Eunice. In 1898, the family had decided to move to Atlanta where they settled in early 1899. By most accounts, they were happy there, living in a big house on 418 Houston Street, with some domestic help. William’s YMCA work with college students continued to accelerate, and he believed it would be practical for him to supervise student work in a large city. When she was old enough to go to school, Eunice attended one of only three primarily Black schools in the city; and the family, like others affiliated with the school, took pride in the fact that their children were taught by others of their race. Shortly after they moved to Atlanta, however, in the spring of 1899, a Black man named Sam Hose was lynched in a town nearby, his body burned, and body parts distributed for “souvenirs.” William and Addie were so horrified, she writes, that they drew away from their friends and even questioned the introduction of a new baby into the world: “The wisdom of having our expected child born to us in such an environment seemed quite doubtful, but after prayer and deep thought, we decided to remain.” Fortunately, she writes, the birth of Eunice came “and bound our love more closely, and later, our second, Alphaeus took the place of the first, whom we lost.”

William and Addie’s children would ultimately provide them with the greatest fulfillment of their lives. Still, the horrific lynching near Atlanta shortly after they moved there would not be the only time they or their children would be exposed so closely to racial hatred and violence. Soon, they would move north in search of a more peaceful life. But William never returned to his childhood home of Canada, and Addie never got a chance to visit Chatham or Ottawa, two cities her husband loved.