He was of mixed African and European ancestry and was born into slavery, his mother and siblings owned by politician and landowner William Boylan.
[2][3][4] His father, also formerly enslaved in Raleigh, had previously purchased his own freedom with the money he earned from nightwork as a shoemaker, and by 1842 had bought his wife and children out of slavery by raising an even larger sum.
Hezekiah Hunter's siblings included William Hammett Hunter—a Wilberforce University graduate and minister in the AME Church, who became the second African American army chaplain commissioned in the United States (part of the 4th United States Colored Infantry Regiment)—and Isaac H. Hunter, Jr., who became a noted orator and delegate to the 1884 Democratic National Convention, authoring the equal rights plank of the Democratic Party platform adopted at that gathering.
[4] He wrote to United States president Ulysses S. Grant in support of a proclamation of martial law in South Carolina counties with Ku Klux Klan activity.
He compared murdered president Abraham Lincoln to Moses and Grant to Joshua, calling on him in the future as in the past to protect "all wherever the Starry Banner Floats" and to stop the Klan from making the "night hideous with the cries of poor women and children" pleading for their own lives and those of their natural protectors; — their fathers sons and husbands.