Hunter-Gault, Charlayne
1942-present · Contribution: 1963-2005
Became, alongside Hamilton Holmes, the first African American student to integrate the University of Georgia in 1961, then built a five-decade journalism career as the New York Times' Harlem bureau chief, a PBS NewsHour national correspondent, and Africa bureau chief for NPR and CNN
Portraits are AI-generated interpretations, not photographs.
Impact on the world
Fighting a two-year legal battle with attorneys including Constance Baker Motley and future National Urban League president Vernon Jordan, Hunter-Gault and classmate Hamilton Holmes desegregated the University of Georgia in January 1961 amid mob violence, cross burnings, and bricks thrown through her dormitory window, graduating in 1963 with a journalism degree; she became the first Black writer at The New Yorker's “Talk of the Town” before joining the New York Times in 1968, where she pushed the paper to change its editorial style guide and eventually became its Harlem bureau chief. She joined PBS's MacNeil/Lehrer Report in 1978, becoming its national correspondent as it grew into The NewsHour, winning two Emmy Awards and two Peabody Awards including for the documentary series “Apartheid's People,” before leaving in 1997 to become NPR's Africa bureau chief and later CNN's Johannesburg bureau chief, interviewing Nelson Mandela more times than nearly any other journalist. She has cited fellow journalist Ida B. Wells-Barnett, already profiled in this collection, as a childhood inspiration discovered while attending segregated schools in Atlanta.
Life & background
Born Alberta Charlayne Hunter on February 27, 1942, in Due West, South Carolina, the daughter of Army chaplain Charles S.H. Hunter Jr. and Althea Ruth Brown Hunter, she moved frequently during childhood before settling primarily in Atlanta and Covington, Georgia, graduating third in her class from Henry McNeal Turner High School in 1959. Initially rejected by the University of Georgia and attending Wayne State University while her legal challenge proceeded, she interned at the Louisville Times and worked at WRC-TV in Washington, D.C., before her Times and PBS careers; her 1963 interracial marriage to classmate Walter Stovall drew public condemnation from Georgia's governor, though the couple later divorced, and she remarried banker Ronald Gault. She has published five books including the memoir In My Place (1992) and the 2023 collection My People: Five Decades of Writing About Black Lives, and continues writing and speaking from Sarasota, Florida, and Martha's Vineyard as of the mid-2020s.
Sources
- Encyclopædia Britannica; New Georgia Encyclopedia; PBS NewsHour
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