Parallel Worlds: The Remarkable Gibbs-Hunts and the Enduring (In)significance of Melanin

Extract

In The Talented Tenth (1903), W. E. B. Du Bois sought to convince white Americans that exceptional African Americans could save the race as long as their efforts were not impeded by racial discrimination. In her engrossing new book, Parallel Worlds, Adele Logan Alexander documents how racism—and the struggle against it—shaped the lives of two members of this very talented black leadership class: Ida Gibbs Hunt and her husband, William Henry Hunt. In this wonderful dual biography, Alexander reveals the interconnected lives of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century black elites as they sought to achieve their potential despite the racism and sexism they faced at every turn.

Ida Gibbs Hunt, the granddaughter of a slave, was the fifth black woman to earn a college degree (graduating from Oberlin College with Anna Julia Cooper and Mary Church Terrell). She became a teacher; a writer who railed against imperialism, racism, and sexism; an internationalist who helped organize Du Bois’s pan-African conferences; and a world traveler. She helped William Henry Hunt, a poor but resourceful man who had been born into slavery, achieve his own Horatio Alger story in his long career as a diplomat with the State Department. Together, the Hunts lived in Madagascar, France, the Azores, and Liberia in a career that took William Henry Hunt around the globe but, as Alexander makes clear, never took full advantage of his diplomatic talents. As a black man, he was limited to what was derisively called the “Liberia-Madagascar-Azores” circuit by racist State Department officials.