Willis M. Carter was an educator and editor who, by the end of the nineteenth century, had become one of Virginia’s best-known African Americans. Born into slavery in Albemarle County, he worked as a laborer and a waiter after the American Civil War (1861–1865). In 1874 he moved to Washington, D.C., and received a teaching degree in 1881. Carter then moved to Staunton, where he spent the rest of his life. He served as principal of the West End School there for fifteen years and as president of the August County Teachers’ Association. Following the Danville Riot in November 1883 he led a group of African Americans that considered leaving Virginia. He also served as editor and president of the black newspaper the Southern Tribune, published in Staunton. (He changed the paper’s name to the Staunton Tribune in 1893.) In 1901 he participated in protests against the new constitutional convention called to disfranchise African Americans. He died in Staunton in 1902.
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