George Kenneth Hunton

Background

Hunton was born in Claremont, N. H. in 1888, the son of George P. Hunton, a small businessman, and Elizabeth Dugan.

Education

He attended public schools in Claremont until 1904, when his family moved to New York City and his father went into the real estate business. Hunton finished his last two years of high school at Holy Cross Preparatory School and entered Holy Cross College in 1906. After only a year as an undergraduate, he began the study of law at Fordham University. He graduated in 1910 with an LL. B.

Career

He was admitted to the New York State bar. From 1912 to 1915, Hunton worked for the Legal Aid Society in Harlem, on Manhattan's Lower East Side, and in Brooklyn. This work acquainted him with the most acute problems of the industrial city. In Brooklyn, in 1915, he started a private legal practice, which was interrupted by a brief stint in the army at Scott Field in Illinois during World War I. Discharged in early 1919, Hunton returned to New York. He became an ardent supporter of the League of Nations, and his advocacy of the world organization and his activities for a group called Woodrow Wilson Democracy brought him and several other like-minded individuals an invitation to visit the White House in October 1920 to discuss the League of Nations. Saddened by the failure of the United States Senate to approve membership in the world body, and by the general course of politics in the 1920's, he did not become deeply involved in social action again until the 1930's.

In 1931, Father John La Farge offered Hunton a job as executive secretary of a fund-raising committee for the Cardinal Gibbons Institute, a secondary school for blacks that the priest had founded near Ridge, Md. , in 1924. La Farge, an editor of the influential Catholic weekly America, became perhaps the foremost Catholic clergyman in the field of civil rights in the era preceding the Supreme Court's decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka (1954). In 1934, La Farge took the lead in forming the Catholic Interracial Council (CIC) of New York, the first such council of its kind. Hunton became the first executive secretary of the CIC and the editor of its official journal, the Interracial Review.

For the next three decades Hunton wedded himself to the task of advancing blacks within the Catholic church and in society at large. As executive secretary of the CIC, Hunton's primary aims were to educate Catholics about the oppression of blacks and to inform his coreligionists about the glaring discrepancy between Catholic theory and Catholic practice toward blacks. This approach was premised on his belief that ignorance about blacks accounted for racial prejudice and that ignorance about the true teachings of the church explained the discontinuity between Catholic ideals and Catholic realities. A rather blunt man with a bit of a temper, Hunton boldly broke the calculated silence of the Roman Catholic church on black-white relations. He pointed out that most Catholic schools, seminaries, hospitals, and social clubs excluded blacks. In defining Catholic doctrine on race relations, Hunton stressed the theological maxim that all men were one in the Mystical Body of Christ; for moral precepts he constantly referred to the papal encyclicals Rerum Novarum (1891) and Quadragesimo Anno (1931). The Interracial Review served as Hunton's principal weapon.

Within a decade it became a kind of national clearinghouse of information for the Roman Catholic church. Numerous Catholic periodicals fed upon it and spread its message widely. In 1944, the Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal, author of An American Dilemma (1944), ranked the Interracial Review third in importance among race-relations journals, behind Crisis and Opportunity. Hunton's activities went beyond strictly Catholic concerns. In the 1930's he crusaded for a federal antilynching bill. In the 1940's he worked for the creation of a permanent Fair Employment Practices Committee in Congress and testified on the issue before a Senate committee in 1945. During World War II and after, as a member of the Advisory Committee on Human Relations, established by the New York City Board of Education, he was a major force in setting up community-action programs.

Hunton and La Farge both retired from the CIC on February 11, 1962. On June 4, 1962, a large number of notables in the movement honored La Farge and Hunton at a banquet in New York, with Mayor Robert F. Wagner as the featured speaker. For the occasion President John F. Kennedy sent a long telegram that lauded the persistent and selfless work of the "beloved priest and the dedicated lawyer. " In August 1963 Hunton mustered enough strength to participate in the famous March on Washington. In 1965 he went suddenly and totally blind. Two years later he died in Brooklyn.

Achievements

• One of his most valuable contributions was to help foster better relations between the Catholic church and other churches and agencies. Hunton and La Farge deserve substantial credit for the fact that by this date the Catholic church had become a vital force in the civil rights movement.

Works

• book

  • All of which I saw, part of which I was;: The autobiography of George K. Hunton as told to Gary MacEoin

Religion

As a part of a tiny Roman Catholic minority in a Protestant town, Hunton felt the sting of religious prejudice at an early age. At Fordham, Hunton came under the influence of Father Terence Shealy, a liberal Jesuit and social scientist, who nudged him toward social action.

Membership

The CIC established cordial working relations with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Urban League, and the March-on-Washington movement of A. Philip Randolph. In 1955 the NAACP selected Hunton to be a member of its national board of directors.

Connections

He never married.

Father:

George P. Hunton

Mother:

Elizabeth Dugan

References

• The Manner is Ordinary