Читать книгу Eunice Hunton Carter - Marilyn Greenwald - Страница 8

EUNICE HUNTON CARTER first came to our attention in 2014 when we visited the Mob Museum in Las Vegas. As part of an extensive exhibit about the first significant mob prosecution in this country in the 1930s, the museum posted a series of large black-and-white photos of special prosecutor Thomas E. Dewey and his legal team of “mob busters.” All but one of these talented attorneys looked exactly as one would think: stern and intimidating, they conveyed a sense of danger and glamor. It was no wonder they ventured into territory even J. Edgar Hoover’s G-men feared to tread.

But one member of Dewey’s team didn’t fit the profile, and the reason was apparent: she was a kindly looking Black woman.

Anyone with even a passing knowledge of US history and civil rights could guess that Carter was an anomaly among the group of young White men who surrounded her on that wall. We knew without investigating that there were few female or Black attorneys in the 1930s, and certainly few Black women attorneys. And we suspected there were few Black prosecutors.

A year or so later, we began looking into the background of Carter: who was she, how did she get the job as mob buster, and how did she thrive in this professional environment in an era of rampant racial discrimination and sexism? What we found was far more interesting than we could have imagined. Carter’s decade working for the ambitious Dewey—who would become the Republican Party’s presidential nominee twice—made up a relatively small part of her fascinating and trailblazing life. Equally as impressive were the lives of her family. Her grandfather was a slave who bought his freedom, fled to Canada, and became a successful businessman. Her mother was an early peace and women’s rights advocate who traveled to France during World War I to aid the Black troops there. Her father nearly single-handedly integrated the nation’s YMCAs at the turn of the century, spending much of his time traveling and organizing in the Jim Crow South. The first generation of Huntons began their lives as slaves in Virginia; the second generation lived in Chatham, Ontario, and became part of a small enclave of former slaves who became prosperous; and the third generation, including Eunice and her brother Alphaeus, became key players in social justice and racial equality movements in the United States and overseas. Eunice’s son, Lisle, continued the tradition of civic involvement. Among many accomplishments, he was the first president of the University of the District of Columbia, legal counsel to the National Urban League, and a high-ranking official of the federal Department of Health, Education, and Welfare.

Eunice’s accomplishments go on: the first Black woman to serve in the New York Prosecutor’s Office; the first Black woman to simultaneously earn a bachelor’s and master’s degree at Smith College at a time when that college was almost exclusively White; and one of the first women to earn a law degree at Fordham University

We hope that by telling Eunice’s story, we can place the era in which she lived in a cultural and historical context and shed light on a crucial period in American history.

PERHAPS FATE INTERVENED when the lives of Thomas E. Dewey and Eunice Hunton Carter became linked. At first, it would appear that the two could not be more opposite. Dewey, who was born three years after Carter and raised in a small town in Michigan, came from a White middle-class and Republican family. His grandfather and father were both newspaper publishers—his father ran the hometown paper—and he, too, became active in journalism in college when he worked at the University of Michigan Daily. Dewey achieved few “firsts” as a young man—one of the reasons he traveled to New York to attend Columbia law school was to follow his girlfriend—later his wife—to New York. He did not graduate at the top of his class.

Ironically, though, Dewey and Carter had more in common than one would think. Both were writers and communicators at heart. Carter as a young woman published reviews, opinion pieces, and fiction in the respected and lively National Urban League publication Opportunity, and she once was viewed by members of the Harlem arts scene during the Harlem Renaissance as an up-and-coming young writer. Dewey wrote for his college newspaper and was an accomplished orator who was one of the first politicians to make extensive use of radio addresses to communicate information and inform voters. Both were Episcopalians, and both were lifelong Republicans. Eunice remained in the party of Lincoln long after many Black Americans abandoned it. (Years after their successful prosecution of the New York mob, Carter joined Dewey’s first few political campaigns.) Although neither was a native New Yorker, both embraced their adopted city with a vengeance—Dewey was a known fixture in Manhattan, as Carter was in Harlem. They both became famous faces and names in these venues.

Furthermore, both were devoted to their jobs. They were tireless workers who did not let barriers, criticism, or initial failures deter them. Indeed, work was a crucial aspect of their lives, sometimes to the detriment of their personal relationships. But the ongoing long workdays were the least of it—neither was happy unless they were working or thinking about work.

Carter and Dewey were both innovative thinkers who didn’t always embrace accepted dogma or existing beliefs. Carter’s master’s thesis at Smith was a rethinking of the structure of local governments, written in minute detail. Dewey used public relations and the cultivation of the media to help beat the mob and further his political career to become within a hair’s breadth of the presidency. Previous politicians and government officials had done this to a limited degree. Still, Dewey perfected it—this was a man who persuaded the publisher of the New York Times to temper that newspaper’s coverage of the mob investigation until he, as special prosecutor, finished it. After all, publicity and “leaks” could hurt or paralyze the probe.

Most important, Dewey recognized a strategic thinker when he saw one; it was Carter, with her sharp mind and knowledge of the streets of Harlem, who provided the final puzzle piece that ultimately clinched the case for the prosecution.

It is impossible to determine what makes the professional relationship between two people gel. In the case of Carter and Dewey, however, it might have been a combination of their similarities and differences. Carter had a razor-sharp mind and could cut someone with a quip, but she was low-key and subdued in public interactions. Dewey was charismatic and dramatic, personality traits that were shaped in part by his long training as a professional singer. Carter was happy to work behind the scenes; Dewey usually took center stage. And both were fearless—not everyone would take a public stance against one of the most brutal and organized criminal networks in the country. Both traveled with bodyguards before and after the trial.

Interestingly, journalism, particularly newspapers, played vital roles in the lives of both, although in different ways. Dewey cultivated the editors and publishers of some of New York City’s leading newspapers to conduct his mob investigation and, later, to court voters during his runs for public office. While many of Carter’s achievements throughout her life were not recorded in the mainstream press—they were given scant attention there—the nation’s thriving Black press paid extensive attention to her, following her achievements and activities in detail for decades. She became a fixture in these national publications, which were largely ignored by White readers, and they treated her as a pioneer, a “doer,” and someone who could serve as a role model for their mostly Black readers.

In actuality, the famous trial of Charles “Lucky” Luciano and his fellow mobsters ultimately played only a minor part in the lives and careers of Dewey and Carter, although that episode was one that was the most publicized and even fictionalized decades later. After the trial, Dewey, almost overnight, earned the reputation as a heroic crime fighter, and his colorful prosecuting techniques were illustrated in newsreels, movies, and fictional accounts of him. Ultimately, Carter, too, achieved the status of minor celebrity more than half a century after the Luciano trial, when a fictionalized version of the dogged Black female assistant prosecutor emerged in the popular Home Box Office television show Boardwalk Empire.

Still, much of the individual legacies of Carter and Dewey have been lost to history. Carter’s decades-long commitment to organizations that furthered racial equality in this country and overseas has long been a footnote in the story of the nation’s civil rights and feminist movements. And Dewey, whose impressive political career included three terms as New York governor and two stints as the Republican nominee for president, has become an iconic figure in popular culture not for his accomplishments but because of a spectacular journalistic gaffe: the famous Chicago Tribune headline proclaiming that “Dewey Defeats Truman” in the 1948 presidential race.

But as their story here reveals, both made contributions far beyond their few years prosecuting killers, prostitutes, and drug dealers. That job served as merely the launching point for much more important work, especially in Carter’s case. She emerged as a role model, activist, and energetic advocate for social justice.

The dogged determination, fearlessness, and devotion to hard work that first drew Eunice Hunton Carter and Thomas E. Dewey to each other would ultimately determine their legacies in other fields and allow them, in their own way, to shape this nation’s history.

THROUGHOUT THIS BOOK, we refer to Eunice Hunton Carter by her first name for reasons of clarity. We do this because many of her relatives with the same last name are an integral part of the story but also because she had two last names in her life—Eunice Hunton, her maiden name, and Eunice Carter, her married name.