Eunice Hunton Carter, 1942. Photographs and Prints Division, Schomberg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library.
New York City, like many major American metropolises, has had a problem with organized crime throughout history. Where there are people and a chance for profit, the mob under various guises may follow. Eunice Hunton Carter, the first Black woman district attorney in the entire state of New York refused to be corrupted or controlled by the mob. As she fought organized crime, she also fought for civil and women’s rights.
Carter was born into a family heavily involved in improving the rights of others when she came into the world on July 16, 1899. Her family lived in Atlanta, Georgia, where her father, William Alphaeus Hunton, Sr., founded the black division of the Y.M.C.A. Her mother, Addie Waites Hunton, was a social worker whose work with the NAACP and Y.M.C.A. earned her national recognition. However, being well-respected within their community and college-educated could not protect the family from the horrors visited by the 1906 Atlanta Massacre against their community from September 22 through September 24.
The family moved north to Brooklyn, New York, where racism still existed, but so did greater opportunities. In 1921, Carter earned two degrees, a bachelor’s and master’s, both cum laude, from Smith College, a women’s liberal arts college since 1871. Carter followed her mother into social work and became a supervisor in the Harlem division of the Emergency Unemployment Relief Committee, originally set up as part of President Hoover’s programs in 1931.
Carter met and married her husband, Lisle Carleton Carter, a dentist who was also an immigrant from Barbados. The couple had one child, Lisle Carter, Jr. While raising her family, Carter not only kept working but also got into civil and political rights, participating as a delegate to the 4th Pan-African Congress in NYC in 1927. The Pan-African Congress was a way for the descendants of the African Diaspora to be represented as the power and authority of European colonization in Africa and the Americas started to wane.
Carter then turned her attention to the legal world, an interest that might date back to her grade school years. In 1927, she was accepted to law school at Fordham University and took evening classes while working and fulfilling her family obligations. In 1932, she earned her legal degree from Fordham but found legal jobs for Black women were few and far between. She was the first Black woman to pass the New York State Bar exam in 1934. She started her own law firm and began to follow court cases that interested her.
Her work brought her to the attention of the Republican Party. Like many Blacks in the first half of the 20th century, she was more aligned with the GOP than the Democrats. She helped the pro-New Deal liberal and even progressive Republican candidates in their bids for office and even after they held office. Yes, there was a time when alignment to liberal or conservative agendas was not divided as strictly along party lines as it is today. In 1934, she lost the election for the 19th District of the New York State Assembly as the GOP candidate by around 1,600 votes.
Following the 1935 riots in Harlem, Carter was appointed by newly elected Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia as Secretary for his bi-racial committee to study the neighborhood. She noticed that a lot of prostitutes were getting out of jail using the same lawyers and going before the same judge. Carter recognized the mob’s hand in all of that and reasoned that they must be big players in prostitution in New York City. In 1935, she spoke to Special Prosecutor Thomas Dewey, who was putting together an anti-mob task force under Mayor LaGuardia. Carter convinced Dewey that she was correct, and he hired her right then and there for his team. The famous “Twenty Against the Underworld” was made up of 19 white men and Carter.
Carter interviewed 100 prostitutes, but only three were willing to cooperate. That was all she needed to pull together the evidence that led to the 1936 conviction of Charlie “Lucky” Luciano. Dewey made her the head of his Special Sessions Bureau in 1937. Her division handled around 14,000 misdemeanors every year. The following year in 1938, she was assigned to lead the Abandonment Bureau of Women’s Courts, which she did until 1945. Her alma mater, Smith College, gave her an honorary doctorate in 1938. While Carter was undoubtedly one of the highest paid Black lawyers in the nation, she was fully aware that she was not paid as well as her male and white colleagues.
By 1945, she went back to private practice and continued her political activism. Before her position with Dewey, she had been a charter member of the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW) in 1935. Beginning in 1945, she held several positions at the United Nations over her lifetime that often focused on women, though not only women’s issues. By 1947, she was the Chair of the UN Committee of Laws.
Until her death on January 25, 1970, Carter was actively involved in several organizations including the Harlem Lawyers Association, the National Association of Women Lawyers, the NCNW, the National Urban League, the New York Women’s Bar Association, and the Y.W.C.A.
In 2006, the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office placed a plaque listing Carter as the first Black woman prosecutor in the state. She was also the inspiration for a character on the television show Boardwalk Empire, in the 7th episode of their 5th season in 2014. If you’d like to learn more about her, read her grandson Stephen L. Carter’s biography of her, titled Invisible: The Forgotten Story of the Black Woman Lawyer Who Took Down America’s Most Powerful Mobster.