Marilyn Greenwald - Eunice Hunton Carter: A Lifelong Fight for Social Justice

A Lifelong Fight for Social Justice

Marilyn S. Greenwald and Yun Li

AN IMPRINT OF FORDHAM UNIVERSITY PRESS
NEW YORK 2021

Copyright 2021 Fordham University Press

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Printed in the United States of America

23 22 215 4 3 2 1

First edition

for Tim

If there is no struggle, there is no progress.

Frederick Douglass, 1857

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 Hoovers G-men feared to tread.

But one member of Deweys team didnt 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. Carters decade working for the ambitious Deweywho would become the Republican Partys presidential nominee twicemade 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 womens rights advocate who traveled to France during World War I to aid the Black troops there. Her father nearly single-handedly integrated the nations 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. Eunices 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.

Eunices accomplishments go on: the first Black woman to serve in the New York Prosecutors Office; the first Black woman to simultaneously earn a bachelors and masters 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 Eunices 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.