Carter began to garner a bit of widespread attention in 2018, when her grandson Stephen L. Carter published Invisible: The Forgotten Story of the Black Woman Lawyer Who Took Down America’s Most Powerful Mobster. Several years earlier, the writers of the HBO show Boardwalk Empire created a character who, like Carter, was largely responsible for the conviction of a Prohibition-era mobster. (At the time, the character spurred mocking among viewers, who were sure that such a person—a Black female prosecutor—was pure fantasy.)

In Eunice Hunton Carter: A Lifelong Fight for Social Justice, Marilyn Greenwald and Yun Li use transcripts, letters, and other archival sources to illuminate Carter’s rich life, from her participation in the Harlem Renaissance and her devising the strategy that would crack open the Luciano case to her involvement with the United Nations and the Pan-African Congress, which helped increase awareness of racism and spur independence movements. Despite all this, though, the authors note that she was “low-key” and “she didn’t boast about her accomplishments.”

Born in Atlanta, she grew up in a family dedicated to social justice. Her father, William Alphaeus Hunton, was a Black YMCA administrator who fought to establish facilities for people of color. And Carter’s mother, Adelina “Addie” Hunton, “never one to remain stationary and tend to the home,” traveled extensively as a civil rights activist and women’s suffragist, including to France during World War I to help rally Black U.S. troops serving there.

Carter earned her bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Smith College—only the second woman in Smith history to earn both within four years. After graduating from Fordham Law School in 1932, she started a private law practice. But it was her 1935 appointment to special prosecutor Thomas E. Dewey’s “Twenty Against the Underworld” legal team that ultimately led to her lasting renown.

As the authors write, “Carter’s decades-long commitment to organizations that furthered racial equality in this country and overseas has long been a footnote in the story of the nation’s civil rights and feminist movements,” but her “dogged determination, fearlessness, and devotion to hard work” allowed her to shape history. Carter followed in her parents’ footsteps when she became a national leader of the YWCA and a member of the U.S. National Council of Negro Women, taking up William’s YMCA torch and Addie’s dedication to women’s suffrage. She served as the liaison to the Women’s Day Court when she was an assistant district attorney, as well.

Fordham Law School recently established the annual Eunice Carter Lecture in her honor. Earlier this month, Nikole Hannah-Jones, creator of The New York Times Magazine’s “1619 Project” and author of the new book The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story, delivered the inaugural lecture.

During the event, held via Zoom and in person at the Lincoln Center campus, Fordham Law Professor Catherine Powell shared some reflections on Carter with a combined audience of more than 500 people, including Carter’s great-granddaughter Leah.

“When I looked up Eunice’s story and realized her work at the U.N.—in advancing the status of women—and her work with the Pan-African Congress, I thought this woman actually embodies the kind of work that I’ve been trying to do since graduating from law school,” Powell said. “Your great-grandmother worked on these issues before we had the term ‘intersectionality.’”

Leah Carter said she believes her great-grandmother would have been “incredibly honored” by the event. “Eunice blazed trails and broke glass ceilings. And, like so many who do, she gained power and influence within deeply imperfect institutions,” she said. “But she tried to make a difference where she could.”

The annual PROSE Awards, given by the Association of American Publishers since 1976, honor authors, editors, and publishers of works that exhibit scholarly excellence and significantly advance their fields.

Invisible: The Forgotten Story of the Black Woman Lawyer Who Took Down America’s Most Notorious Mobster by Stephen L. Carter (Macmillan)

In 1936, just four years after graduating from Fordham Law School, 36-year-old Eunice Carter, LAW ’32, masterminded the sting operation that resulted in the imprisonment of mobster Charles “Lucky” Luciano. Carter, the first African-American woman to serve as a New York assistant district attorney, was the only woman and the only person of color on the team—led by future New York governor Thomas E. Dewey—that brought down the country’s biggest gangster.

Carter’s grandson, Yale Law School professor and best-selling author Stephen L. Carter, recounts his grandmother’s time at Fordham, her meteoric rise as a prosecutor, and her work on the Luciano case in Invisible: The Forgotten Story of the Black Woman Lawyer Who Took Down America’s Most Powerful Mobster, published last October by Macmillan.

“She was black and a woman and a lawyer, a graduate of Smith and the granddaughter of three slaves and one free woman of color, as dazzlingly unlikely a combination as one could imagine in New York of the 1930s,” he writes of his grandmother, “and without her work the Mafia boss would never have been convicted.”

Eunice Carter spearheaded the investigation that proved the mob ran New York City’s brothels, and she helped flip witnesses that specified Luciano’s involvement. The mob kingpin was subsequently sentenced to 30 to 50 years in prison in 1936.

Carter’s career-defining achievement came at a time when the American Bar Association discriminated against African-American lawyers, and women lawyers’ contributions were rarely recognized. Her grandson’s book notes that while Carter’s triumphs were shadowed by tragedy and prejudice—and her path was often blocked by the social and political expectations of her time—she never accepted defeat.

“Skill, talent, and ingenuity prevail in woman-kind as well as man-kind,” Carter declared many years later at the International Council of Women triennial conference in Greece. “A country or community which fails to allow its women to choose and develop their individual beings in an atmosphere of freedom thrusts away from itself a large part of the human resources which can give it strength and vitality.”

Carter enrolled at Fordham Law in 1927 intent on declaring her own freedom from a life as a Harlem “society matron.” The wife of a prominent dentist and mother of a young child, she was eager to escape what she saw as a “prison of domesticity,” her grandson writes. One year into law school, however, Carter was excused to care for her ill son. When she returned to Fordham 18 months later, she did so while working full time as a supervisor in the Harlem division of the Emergency Unemployment Relief Committee.

Carter’s time at Fordham marked the realization of a desire to study law that dated back to age 8, her grandson notes. It was then that she told a young boy on the beach that she wanted to be a lawyer “to make sure the bad people went to jail.” Three decades later, she put America’s most powerful mobster behind bars.

—Ray Legendre