Addie Waites Hunton
Addie Waites Hunton (June 11, 1866 – June 21, 1943) was an African-American suffragist, educator, writer, and activist who worked to improve race and gender equality.
She was born in Norfolk, Virginia. After her mother died when she was young, she moved to Boston to live with her aunt. In Boston she attended the Boston Latin School and then Spencerian College of Commerce, becoming the first Black woman to graduate from that school in 1889.
Hunton began her career teaching at the State Normal and Agricultural College in Normal, Alabama (now Alabama A&M University). She later moved to New York, where she was recognized by the YWCA and became a secretary in 1907, organizing projects for Black students and traveling to survey YWCA programs in the South and Midwest. She also worked to recruit more Black women to the YWCA.
She served as the national organizer for the National Association of Colored Women from 1906 to 1910. In Atlanta, she and her husband William Alphaeus Hunton raised four children, though only two survived infancy. The family later moved to Brooklyn after the 1906 Atlanta riot. William Hunton died in the mid-1910s.
From 1909 to 1910, Hunton and her children studied in Strasbourg, Germany, and she also took courses at the City College of New York. When the United States entered World War I, she joined the YMCA and sailed to France in 1918 to work with Black troops. In Saint-Nazaire she helped start literacy programs and discussions on art, music, religion, and other topics. In May 1919 she was personally involved in the difficult task of helping to recover and rebury Black soldiers who had died in the Meuse-Argonne battles.
In 1920 Hunton and Kathryn Johnson published Two Colored Women With the American Expeditionary Forces, about their wartime experiences. She later wrote a book about her husband, William Alphaeus Hunton, A Pioneer Prophet of Young Men (1938). She married James W. Floyd in 1923, but they divorced by 1924.
Hunton’s children and descendants continued to impact law, education, and activism. Her daughter Eunice Hunton Carter became a lawyer, and her son W. Alphaeus Hunton Jr. had a notable career as well.
Addie Hunton’s life was dedicated to peace, race relations, and empowering Black women. She proposed a three-part peace strategy: encourage Black women to form an international organization, involve them in the Pan-African movement, and include Black women in the broader peace movements led by White Americans. She died in Brooklyn, New York, on June 21, 1943.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 22:13 (CET).