Charles Norfleet Hunter was born on January 9, 1852, in Raleigh, North Carolina. Hunter was the son of an artisan, Osborne Hunter, and an enslaved woman, Mary Hunter. He attended a freedmen's school in Raleigh and completed coursework at Shaw and the University of South Carolina. From 1869 to 1874, he served as an assistant cashier at the Freedmen's Savings and Trust Company's Raleigh branch. He dedicated his working life to the uplift of fellow Black citizens, spending many years as a professor or principal for a variety of Black schools in North Carolina. He was a prolific contributor of newspaper editorials on the state of race relations in North Carolina and the broader south. Hunter died in Wake County, North Carolina, on September 4, 1931.