Charles N. Hunter and Race Relations in North Carolina
(The James Sprunt Studies in History and Political Science, 6) Paperback – April 16, 1987
Summary:
Charles Norfleet Hunter (January 9, ca. 1852 – September 4, 1931) was an American educator, journalist, and historian. He was one of the founders of the North Carolina Negro State Fair.
Hunter actively engaged in several late nineteenth-century reform movements. In the 1870s, he participated in the Temperance movement.
Beginning in his twenties, Hunter played a significant role as a teacher or principal at the "Colored Graded Schools" in Durham, Goldsboro, and Raleigh as well as at rural schools in Robeson, Chatham, Cumberland, and Johnston Counties. Hunter also helped lead an initiative to build the Berry O'Kelly Training School (previously known as the Method School) in Method, North Carolina.
Charles Norfleet Hunter was born on January 9, circa 1852 in Raleigh, North Carolina.
He was about 12 years old when he and his family experienced emancipation from slavery.
In the antebellum years, Charles’ father Osborne Hunter, Sr. was an artisan, carpenter and mill wright who “hired his own time” from his master and his wife's master, William Dallas Haywood, one-time Raleigh mayor and prominent land and slave owner.
While his mother was living, Hunter, his brother Osborne, and two sisters lived with their parents on the northwest corner of Jones and Dawson Streets, Raleigh, North Carolina.
After his mother's death in 1855, Hunter's family moved into the “family home of our owners” where Charles and his siblings received care from their enslaved Aunt Harriet. Charles remembered his Aunt Harriet as a “exceptionally intelligent woman” who like several other family members on his maternal side, had become a “fluent reader” and a good writer “before the surrender.”
This achievement of literacy was especially remarkable given that the North Carolina statutes from 1832 through the 1854 revision (R.S. c.34, s.74) stated that it was a crime to teach "or attempt to teach'" a slave to read or write or "sell or give him any book or pamphlet.”
After the Civil War, Hunter received an education in the Freedmen's schools in Raleigh. In 1874, he became the Assistant Cashier at the Raleigh branch of the Freedman's Saving Bank. After the bank failed, Hunter served as chief clerk in the assessor's office of the Internal Revenue Service for several southern states.
In 1875, Hunter began his teaching career by teaching Black students in Shoe Heel, North Carolina (now called Maxton, NC) in Robeson County. Eventually, Hunter would teach in the city schools of Durham, Goldsboro and Raleigh and rural schools in Wake, Chatham, and Johnston counties.
He served as Principal of the Garfield School in 1890. For a brief period, Hunter worked as mail carrier for the post office. With the assistance of Republican congressman James Edward O’Hara from North Carolina's "Black second district," Hunter assumed the position of Postmaster of Raleigh and was the first Black man to hold this post.
After President Grover Cleveland took office, Hunter resigned his Postmaster position and went to work as a traveling agent for the textbook publisher A.S. Barnes where he focused his sales work on schools for African American children.
As public school teacher, journalist, and historian, Hunter devoted his long life to improving opportunities for Blacks.
A political activist, but never a radical, he skillfully used his journalistic abilities and his personal contacts with whites to publicize the problems and progress of his race.
He urged Blacks to ally themselves with the best of the white leaders, and he constantly reminded whites that their treatment of his race ran counter to their professed religious beliefs and the basic tenets of the American liberal tradition.
By carefully balancing his efforts, Hunter helped to establish a spirit of passive protest against racial injustice.
John Haley's compelling book, largely based on Hunter's voluminous papers, affords a unique opportunity to view race relations in North Carolina through the eyes of a Black man.
It also provides the first continuous survey of the Black experience in the state from the end of the Civil War to the Great Depression, an account that critiques the belief that race relations were better in North Carolina than in other southern states.
