Hunton, W Alphaeus

HUNTON, W. ALPHAEUS (1903-1970). Considered by W.E.B. DuBois as “quiet, studious, conscientious and absolutely uncorruptible,” William Alphaeus Hunton, Jr., was a prominent African American activist and scholar, a life-long member of the Communist Party, USA. Born in Atlanta, Georgia, and raised in Brooklyn, Hunton graduated from Howard University in 1924 and then received a Master’s degree in English from Harvard University in 1926. Afterward, he taught English at Howard and led the effort to organize the university’s faculty into the American Federation of Teachers Local 440.

By 1936, Hunton would become a founding member and early leader of the National Negro Congress (NNC), one of the most prominent Communist-led Black Popular Front organizations. He led the Washington, D.C. chapter of the NNC and chaired its Labor Committee where he helped “Blast Jim Crow out of Washington.” He also served on the editorial board of the NNC’s journal, Congress View. In 1938, he earned a Ph.D from New York University.

In the early 1940s, Hunton also worked with American Peace Mobilization (APM), considered by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) as “one of the most seditious organizations which ever operated in the United States.” In May 1941, Hunton was called to testify before HUAC about his peace activism. He responded to HUAC’s inquisitors with disgust, saying “I see nothing subversive” in an organization “dedicated to the maintenance of peace and democracy.”

During the time, Hunton also spearheaded the fight for “all-out defense of democracy” in the defense industry, particularly at the Baltimore based Glenn L. Martin Aircraft Plant, where he worked with other CPUSA members, such as George Meyers (Maryland CIO president), to win jobs for African Americans.

In 1943, Hunton resigned from his teaching position at Howard University, and moved to New York City where he became the educational director of the Council on African Affairs (CAA). Founded in 1937 as the International Council on African Affairs (ICAA), led by Paul Robeson and Max Yergan, the CAA was “distinctly different,” more adversarial than its predecessor embracing anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist politics. According to historian Penny Von Eschen, the post-World War II CAA was part of “a second incarnation” of the Popular Front and is considered by Gerald Horne “the vanguard organization in the U.S. campaigning against colonialism” and apartheid in South Africa.

Hunton joined Robeson, CAA chairman, and later DuBois, who would become vice chair, among other activist-scholars. According to the New York Times, the CAA was nothing more than a “Communist-controlled organization supported mainly by Negroes.” Regardless, it built cross-Atlantic alliances with, for example, the African National Congress and the South African Communist Party and initiated domestic petition drives in support of the ANC’s Defiance Campaign, foreshadowing the Free Nelson Mandela Campaigns that emerged decades later. Hunton also wrote regularly for the CAA’s publications New Africa and later Spotlight on Africa, as well as the Daily Worker.

In 1951, HUAC branded the CAA a “Communist front.” Hunton, who also served as a trustee of the Civil Rights Congress (CRC) defense fund, was sentenced to a six-month jail sentence for “refusing to divulge” names of CRC contributors. Like the CRC, the CAA by 1955 was forced to dissolve due to the anti-Communist witch-hunt.

By 1957, Hunton had written Decision in Africa: Sources of Current Conflict. DuBois praised his friend and co-worker and noted, “I know of no one today who has a more thorough knowledge and understanding of that continent [Africa].” He called Decision in Africa “a brilliant exposition” on U.S. imperialism.

During the late-1950s and early-1960s, Hunton wrote for Political Affairs and Masses & Mainstream, and traveled throughout Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union as a respected African American activist-scholar.

In 1962, Hunton was invited to Ghana by DuBois to help with the Encyclopedia Africana. After DuBois’ death in August 1963, Hunton took charge of the Encyclopedia, overseeing the projected 10 volume project. Unfortunately, in 1966 Hunton’s patron, the charismatic socialist first president of the newly independent Ghana Kwame Nkrumah, was deposed by a CIA-backed coup. Hunton and his wife, Dorothy, were soon deported. In early-1967, Zambian president Kenneth Kaunda invited the Hunton's to that country as his guest, where Alphaeus continued to write extensively on the struggles for African American equality, Black liberation, and the anti-colonial struggles.

Hunton died on January 13, 1970 in Lusaka, Zambia. Considered “one of the most neglected African American intellectual” of the 20th century, a consequence of his life-long membership in the CPUSA, Hunton was, however, greatly admired by his contemporaries, particularly W.E.B. DuBois and Paul Robeson.

Grant, Nicholas. Winning Our Freedoms Together: African Americans and Apartheid, 1945-1960. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017.

Gellman, Erik S. Death Blow to Jim Crow: The National Negro Congress and the Rise of Militant Civil Rights. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014.

Pecinovsky, Tony. Let Them Tremble: Biographical Interventions Marking 100 Years of the Communist Party, USA. New York: International Publishers, 2019.

Von Eschen, Penny M., Race Against Empire: Black Americans and Anticolonialism, 1937-1957. New York: Cornell University Press, 1997.

William Alphaeus Hunton papers, 1926-1967, The New York Public Library, http://archives.nypl.org/scm/20646