Ida Alexander Gibbs Hunt (November 16, 1862 – December 19, 1957)[1] was an advocate of racial and gender equality and co-founded one of the first YWCAs in Washington, D.C., for African-Americans in 1905.

Ida's father, Judge Mifflin Wistar Gibbs, was one of the wealthiest African-Americans in the United States in the late nineteenth century.

She was a part of the first class of black women to graduate from the school in 1884 alongside Mary Church Terrell and Anna Julia Cooper.

[10][3] She had to leave her teaching job upon marriage because until 1920, married women in the public school system in Washington, D.C., were forced to stop working.

After her marriage, Gibbs Hunt accompanied her husband on his diplomatic assignments, including to Liberia, France, Madagascar, and Guadeloupe.

Between 1905 and 1907, Gibbs Hunt returned to the United States and endorsed Washington, D.C.'s new Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA).

[6] During World War I, Gibbs Hunt was active in the French Red Cross where she aided Belgian refugees and visited wounded Allied soldiers.

[2] The Paris Peace Conference marked beginning of Gibbs Hunt's political leadership beyond her role as a diplomat's wife.

[8] She also advocated for world disarmament and for the appointment of black representatives at the 1923 London Third Pan-African Congress in a paper entitled “The Colored Races and the League of Nations."

[3] Though Du Bois is recognized as the leader of the Pan-African movement, Gibbs Hunt was the major organizer behind the 1919 conference, and an influential member of the Executive Committee in subsequent years.