Caroline Hunter

Caroline Hunter (born September 5, 1946, in New Orleans, Louisiana) is an American activist, chemist and educator who has served on the Cambridge Public School Committee since 2022. In her early career, she co-founded the Polaroid Revolutionary Workers Movement, which petitioned the Polaroid Corporation to end its support of South African apartheid.

Early life Hunter was born into a Black Catholic family on September 5, 1946, in New Orleans, Louisiana. During her upbringing during segregation, she was legally prevented from sitting at the front of the bus, trying on clothes in the department stores and eating at the lunch counter. As a 10th grader attending Xavier University Preparatory School Hunter was moved by reading the novel Cry, the Beloved Country which depicts the oppression of South African apartheid. She memorized and copied passages from the book into her other textbooks. Hunter proceeded to Xavier University of Louisiana, where she earned a degree in Chemistry.

Career

Polaroid Revolutionary Workers Movement (1970–1977) After college, Hunter worked as a research bench chemist for the Polaroid Corporation in Cambridge, Massachusetts. During this period, she became the first African American woman to challenge her employer’s South African investments. In 1970, Hunter and her co-worker, future husband Ken Williams, discovered the involvement of their employer, Polaroid, in the South African apartheid system as the producer of the passbook photos used to identify black individuals in South Africa. To pressure Polaroid to divest from South Africa, Hunter and Williams created the Polaroid Revolutionary Worker Movement (PRWM). She was vice chair as of June 2025.

Recognition Hunter was invited to give the keynote at the Dr. Effie Jones Memorial Luncheon at the AASA National Conference on Education, at the Music City Center in Nashville, Tennessee, and received the Dr. Effie Jones Humanitarian Award from the American Association of School Administrators on February 14, 2014.