Haroldson Lafayette Hunt Jr. (February 17, 1889 – November 29, 1974) was an American oil tycoon and Republican political activist.


By trading poker winnings for oil rights, he ultimately secured title to much of the East Texas Oil Field, one of the world's largest oil deposits. From it and his other acquisitions, he accrued a fortune that was among the world's largest. At his death, he was reputed to have the highest net worth of any individual in the world.


Multiple sources, among them American civil rights icon Malcolm X, implicate Hunt as a lifelong racist who provided major financial assistance to several farright organizations including the Minutemen and the John Birch Society. Hunt considered African Americans as a political threat and made this clear in his radio interviews and broadcasts.


One of Hunt’s chief allies, Alfred Zoll, indicated that since 1936 Hunt advocated deporting all African Americans to Africa. For this reason, Hunt supplied Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad, with continuous financial support due to Elijah Muhammad’s belief in racial separation from whites.

In 1965, Hunt encouraged Alabama Gov. George C. Wallace, a white supremacist, to use the scheme of running his wife, Lurleen Wallace, for election as governor in a bald effort to subvert the state's constitutional rule that a governor could not succeed himself.


Madeleine Duncan Brown, an advertising executive who claimed to have had both an extended love affair and a son with President Lyndon B. Johnson, said that she was present at a party at the Dallas home of Clint Murchison Sr. (another oil tycoon), on the evening prior to the assassination of John F. Kennedy that was attended by Johnson as well as other famous, wealthy, and powerful individuals including Hunt, Murchison, J. Edgar Hoover, and Richard Nixon.

According to Brown, Johnson had a meeting with several of the men after which he told her: "After tomorrow, those goddamn Kennedys will never embarrass me again. That's no threat. That's a promise."


Brown's story received national attention and became part of at least a dozen John F. Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories.