Hunter C. Haynes was not a filmmaker by training — he was an inventor and manufacturer first. Born in 1867 in Selma, Alabama, to parents who had been enslaved, Haynes built a career as a barber before inventing a pretreated, ready-to-use razor strop that he turned into a genuine manufacturing success, founding the Haynes Razor Strop Company in Chicago in 1904. That business gave him something almost no other early Black filmmaker had: independent capital of his own, earned outside the film industry entirely.
Haynes entered film work as a producer for the Afro-American Film Company, a white-owned Kansas City outfit that made films with Black casts — including footage of Black organizations in Philadelphia and coverage connected to Booker T. Washington. Working inside a white-owned operation making Black-cast films gave Haynes a direct view of the industry’s limitations, and he moved to establish his own company, the Haynes Photoplay Company, in New York City. In 1914, it produced three comedy shorts: Lovie Joe’s Romance, One Large Evening, and Uncle Remus’ First Visit to New York, the last starring Abbie Mitchell alongside Tom Brown, Billy Harper, Wesley Jones, and Allie Gilliam.
Haynes’s film career was cut short by illness rather than business failure. Diagnosed with tuberculosis, he relocated to Saranac Lake, New York in 1916 for treatment, continuing what professional activity his health allowed. He died there on January 1, 1918, at age fifty, and was returned to Selma, Alabama for burial — the same soil his parents had once been enslaved on, closing a life that ran from bondage to barbering to razor-strop manufacturing to motion pictures in a single generation.