William Henry Hunt

William Henry Hunt (1869–1951) was an African-American diplomat, one of the few African Americans in the United States diplomatic corps (foreign service) during the 19th century.

Born in Tennessee, Hunt moved north where he was educated at Williams College. He was befriended by Mifflin Wistar Gibbs, who hired him as an aide for his 1897 consular posting in Madagascar. Hunt was appointed to succeed Gibbs there and went on to serve at posts in France, Portugal, Guadeloupe and Liberia, retiring in 1932. He settled in Arkansas, where he became active in law and politics.

Life William Hunt was born in 1869 in Tennessee. He was of mixed heritage, as was his mother, whose father is believed to be a white planter who served as vice president. Through a series of lucky encounters, he acquired a patron and was educated at Lawrence Academy in Massachusetts. He enrolled as one of three African-American students at Williams College in Massachusetts in the 1880s. She had been educated at Oberlin College and was a friend and colleague of W. E. B. Du Bois. Ida Gibbs Hunt and Du Bois worked together on the Pan-African Congresses held in Europe in the 1910s and 1920s. In 1923 in London, she gave a talk on "The Colored Races and the League of Nations." He would then serve in Guadeloupe, Portugal (the Azores) and Liberia before retiring in 1932. His later career included law and politics in Arkansas.

Claude McKay refers in his Harlem Renaissance novel Banjo (1929) to a "Negroid" consul working at an American consulate in a "town near Lyon," France (likely intended to refer to Hunt).