Hunton, Alphaeus, 1903-1970

William Alphaeus Hunton was an expert on Africa, political activist, administrator of the Council on African Affairs, 1943-1955, and the Encyclopedia Africana Project in Ghana, 1962-1966.

From the description of William Alphaeus Hunton papers, 1926-1967. (Unknown). WorldCat record id: 122580347

Born in Atlanta, Georgia on September 18, 1903, William Alphaeus Hunton, Jr. was a scholar and a political activist. His grandfather, Stanton Hunton, a former slave, migrated from Virginia to the little town of Chatham in Canada in 1840. An abolitionist and a close friend of John Brown, he participated in the planning of the battle of Harper's Ferry. His son, William Alphaeus, Sr. migrated to Atlanta where he served as the first black General Secretary of the black section of the Young Men's Christian Association. Addie Waite Hunton, Alphaeus Sr.'s wife, studied sociology at the College of the City of New York and at Kaiser Wilhelm University in Strassburg, Germany. She taught at the Alabama A & M College and was a founding member of the National Association of Colored Women. The couple moved to Brooklyn with their two children, William Alphaeus, Jr. and his sister Eunice, after the Atlanta riots of 1906.

William Alphaeus Hunton, Jr. attended Boys High School in Brooklyn. His father had died prematurely in 1916, and he worked as a porter for the next few years to finance his education. He graduated from Howard University in 1924, and Harvard University in 1926. Upon graduation from Harvard, he became an instructor and later a lecturer and assistant-professor in the English and Romance Languages Department at Howard University. During this time, he was also a Ph.D candidate at New York University. His doctoral dissertation, Tennyson and the Victorian Political Milieu was accepted in 1938. Hunton successfully argued that Tennyson and other influential ideologues of British imperialist expansion in the 19th century were more concerned with leadership and the preservation of the status quo than the democratic ideals of the French revolution.

While still at Howard University, Hunton attended the founding convention of the National Negro Congress in Chicago in 1936. A member of the National Executive Board, he helped launch the Washington, D.C. branch of that organization and was the chairman of its Labor Committee. He led and participated in several campaigns to “blast Jim Crow out of Washington,” and in his own words, “make the District budget serve the human needs of the community.” Through boycotts, picket lines, demonstrations, petitions and strikes, the Washington branch of the National Negro Congress sought to combat racial discrimination against black workers in the federal government bureaucracy, in stores, hotels and various branches of industry, as well as in the fields of health, education and housing. In April 1940, Hunton was instrumental in organizing the NNC's third conference in Washington, D.C.; he chaired the committee which drafted the NNC constitution, and delivered a major address, Negroes and the War on nationwide radio. The National Negro Congress was a broad federation of some 3,000 civic, religious and fraternal organizations dedicated to the achievement of social, cultural, political and economic equality for blacks. During the Second World War, however, it was accused by the Dies Committee on Un-American Activities of attempted sabotage of the defense industry through the “infiltration of black communists” in the work force.

Hunton became the Educational Director of the Council on African Affairs in 1943, during a one year leave of absence from Howard University. The following year, he resigned from his job as a professor and settled permanently in New York with his third wife, Dorothy Williams. After the withdrawal of Max Yergan from the post of Executive Director of the CAA, Hunton additionally assumed the role of executive secretary - assuring, often alone, the functioning of the entire organization until its dissolution in 1955. Through his work in the CAA, Hunton sought to educate the general public about the history of Africa and its struggle against colonialism and imperialism. In addition to the publication of its monthly bulletin New Africa and a regular newsletter, Spotlight on Africa, which featured in-depth stories on Africa by renown scholars such as W.E.B. DuBois and Hunton himself, the Council mounted effective public campaigns and raised funds around specific issues such as the Campaign of Defiance Against Unjust Laws in South Africa, the partition of the former Italian colonies in East Africa by the NATO powers in 1949 and the jailing of black leaders in Kenya and South Africa in 1953. But the emergence of the Cold War and the increasing scrutiny of the House Un-American Activities Committee of civil rights and progressive organizations in this country hampered the work of the Council. The CAA and its officers were repeatedly investigated and accused of subversion, unpatriotism and disloyalty. Then, in 1951, Hunton, along with three other trustees of the Civil Rights Bail Fund, itself labelled a “communist front,” were sentenced to six months in prison for refusing to submit their records to the HUAC.

Due to the generally negative attitude toward communists and their associates in this country, Hunton was unable, after the dissolution of the CAA in 1955 to resume his academic career. His book, Decision on Africa was published in 1957 with an introduction by DuBois who praised it as an important scholarly work. Meanwhile, he worked for the Hudson Bay Fur Company and as a seasonal employee. Although he was able during that period to travel to Africa where he was honored by several heads of state, according to his wife, he often deplored that he could not contribute more than occasional lectures to the quickly unfolding political situation in the Africa of the late 1950s. Thus, when President Sekou Toure invited him to immigrate to Guinea, he quickly accepted.

In the course of an interview with President Sekou Toure in Conakry in July 1960, Hunton outlined his interest in editing a new English edition of Toure's speeches and writings, and in teaching a course on Foreign Affairs at the Guinean National School of Administration. Meanwhile, he accepted the post of English teacher at the Lycée Classique de Donka, and for a time served as temporary editor of the weekly English bulletin of the Information Ministry. In 1962 he resigned his appointment and accepted an invitation from W.E.B. DuBois to work in Ghana under his direction.

Two years earlier, Nkrumah had invited DuBois to Ghana to write a comprehensive history of Africa and its contribution to world civilization. Undertaking this pioneering effort was a welcomed challenge to Hunton's scholarly and administrative abilities. In addition, he wanted the opportunity to work directly with DuBois and Nkrumah, whose philosophies of pan-africanism and anti-imperialism he had espoused since the 1940s. As secretary of the Encyclopedia Africana Project at the Ghana Academy of Sciences Hunton proved to be an effective administrator who, within five years, built the conceptual, human and material framework for the ten volume encyclopedia slated for publication under the auspices of the Organization of African Unity, beginning in 1970. With the overthrow of Nkrumah, however, he was demoted in late 1965 to the post of area editor. The following year, Hunton was expelled from Ghana, along with his wife and other American expatriates, and given ten days to leave the country. The Encyclopedia Africana Project was subsequently abandoned.

The expulsion order was consistent with Hunton's expressed views, prior to the coup, on governments similar to the National Liberation Council which overthrew Nkrumah. Following the independence of several African countries in the early 1960s and the publication of his major book, Decision on Africa, Hunton had written and lectured widely on neo-colonialism and imperialist domination versus development in Africa. He asserted that the colonial powers had yielded to popular self-government demands in certain areas in order to strengthen their economic domination, and that the rulers of certain of the newly independent African countries were in fact “the willing servants of their imperialist masters.” In a speech at the German African Society in East Germany in 1961, he explained that the comprador comprador =dependent merchant or capitalist sectors which function as managers or middle-men for international financial interest in the underdevelped world. African ruling classes had reneged on their promises of improvement for the majority of people in favor of personal greed, increased economic and political dependency on international finance capital, and military rule. Hunton's embryonic sociology of class, leadership and development in the emerging African nations thus earned him the enmity of the post-Nkrumah government.

Following the expulsion order, the Huntons sailed to New York in late 1966, only to return to Africa the following year on a personal invitation from Zambian president Kenneth Kaunda. Hunton had hoped at first to resume his work on the Encyclopedia Africana while in Zambia, but Kaunda's efforts near the Ghanaian military government were to no avail. He began work instead on a history and compilation of the nationalist movement in Zambia, under the sponsorship of the Kenneth Kaunda Foundation. This project was also never completed. William Alphaeus Hunton died of cancer in Lusaka on January 13, 1970 at the age of 63.

From the guide to the William Alphaeus Hunton papers, 1926-1967, (The New York Public Library. Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division.)