Feature Friday

I am so excited that we have been blessed to see another Black History Month! It’s imperative that we not forget the many African Americans that came before us and were an essential part of America’s history. In wake of the celebration of Black History Month we will feature an African American woman whom played a role in the progression of American History every Friday this month. Today I would like to feature a woman that helped pave a significant role in my path. This would be non other than my fellow alumnus, Charlayne Hunter-Gault. Charlayne Hunter-Gault holds a place in Georgia civil rights history as one of the first two African American students admitted to the University of Georgia. She is a wife, the proud mother of two and has maintained a journalism career of excellence.

Charlayne Hunter was born on February 27, 1942, in Due West, South Carolina. Her father was an army chaplain. Although, her fathers’ occupation caused the family to move several times, Hunter spent most of her childhood in Covington, SC and Atlanta, GA. Hunter-Gault’s father was a critical influence in her life. "He was an important part of my life and development because he set standards for me that were very high," Hunter-Gault told Southern Living. She has often cited her grandmother as a key role model as well; she helped spark a healthy curiosity about the world in the future award-winning reporter. Hunter-Gault's first encounter with prejudice over race occurred when she was a child.

By age 12 Charlayne had decided to pursue a career in journalism. "With a passion bordering on obsession," she revealed in her autobiography In My Place, "I wanted to be a journalist." Hunter-Gault excelled at Turner High School in Atlanta, the top black school in a city where black and white students were still educated under separate roofs. Hunter was active in numerous clubs and student organizations, including the school newspaper, the student council, and the honor society. She edited the school newspaper and wrote for a community weekly during her high school years. She became the school's homecoming queen and graduated number three in her class in 1959.

Since her adolescence, Hunter wanted to attend a college with a strong journalism program. In Georgia this meant the University of Georgia (UGA) in Athens, which did not admit African Americans, so Hunter applied to several Midwestern schools. During her last year at Turner, however, Hunter was approached by a group of Atlanta's black civic leaders who were looking for talented students to challenge segregation in Georgia's colleges and universities. Hunter and her classmate Hamilton Holmes decided to apply to The University of Georgia and were denied admission, and in the fall of 1959 Hunter enrolled at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan. While Hunter began her studies in Michigan she and Holmes sent applications to UGA each quarter, and their attorneys challenged the admissions decision. After two years of legal battles Judge William Bootle, a U.S. District Court judge, issued his ruling on the matter on January 6, 1961, stating that the "plaintiffs are qualified for and entitled to immediate enrollment at the University of Georgia." Thus Charlayne Hunter and Hamilton Holmes became the first African American students in the school's history.

Hunter and Holmes arrived on the UGA campus on January 9, 1961, to register for classes. The new students were met with taunts and racist outburst. Two days later, after a basketball game, a crowd gathered outside Hunter's dormitory, smashing windows with bottles and bricks. The mob was finally dispersed by Athens police armed with tear gas. That night the Georgia State Patrol escorted the students back to their homes in Atlanta, and the University of Georgia suspended both Hunter and Holmes, supposedly for their own safety. Days later, after a new court order was issued, the students returned to campus and resumed their classes. As the writer Calvin Trillin noted in his account of their experience, Hunter "attracted much more attention than Hamilton," who lived off campus and went home on weekends. Hunter was sometimes met with animosity from students who jeered at her while she crossed campus. In the midst of this Hunter-Gault never considered leaving. She stated in Southern Living: "I think it was the result of having a goal and having support for that and being supported by a lot of really good people who made sacrifices for us."

Hunter graduated from UGA in 1963 and accepted her first job as an editorial assistant at the New Yorker magazine in New York City. After advancing to the position of staff writer, she left the magazine to accept a Russell Sage Fellowship for one year, then worked as a reporter and evening anchor for WRC-TV in Washington, D.C., for another year. Hunter returned to print journalism in 1968, joining the metropolitan staff of the New York Times and establishing the newspaper's Harlem bureau. Hunter-Gault left the New York Times in 1978 to join PBS's MacNeil/Lehrer Report, becoming national correspondent and filling in as anchor when the program expanded to become The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour. Hunter-Gault left public television in 1997 to join her husband, who had been transferred to South Africa; she became the chief correspondent in Africa for National Public Radio (NPR). She departed NPR in 1999 to join CNN and currently serves as the network's Johannesburg, South Africa, bureau chief.

Charlayne Hunter-Gault has staked her claim as one of the leading journalists in the United States. Hunter-Gault has built a reputation as a keen investigator of social injustice, especially among African Americans. She has received two National News and Documentary Emmy Awards as well as two Peabody Awards. Despite the difficulty of her years as a student, Hunter-Gault has maintained close ties with UGA. In 1985, in celebration of the school's bicentennial, UGA created the annual Holmes-Hunter Lecture. Hunter-Gault returned to campus to deliver the commencement address in 1988; she was the school's first black graduation speaker. In an interview with Southern Living, Hunter-Gault said, "I knew that we had really reached a significant milestone in the reconciliation between the Georgia we entered and the Georgia that I wanted it to be." As recounted in the Atlantic, Hunter-Gault's address to the university stressed the need for "acknowledging the guiding principles of fundamental human decency and then living by them" in "a waiting and needful world."

In 1992 Hunter-Gault published a memoir of her childhood and her years at UGA, In My Place. In regards to In My Place, The New Yorker concluded: "This book is a vivid retelling of history, and should take its place as one of the informal literary classics of the civil rights movement." Hunter-Gault also established an academic scholarship along with Holmes for African American students. In 2001 the Academic Building where Hunter-Gault and Holmes first registered for classes at UGA was named the Holmes-Hunter Academic Building to mark the fortieth anniversary of the school's desegregation.

Throughout her successful career, she has never lost sight of herself as a black journalist, and in a piece for Fortune; she emphasized the need for the media to present African Americans "as whole people." In his 1989 book I Dream a World: Portraits of Black Women Who Changed the World, Brian Lanker quoted her as saying: "You have to assess every situation that you're in and have to decide, is this happening because I'm black? Is this happening because I'm a woman? Or is this happening because this is how it happens?"

References cited from two sources; (http://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/nge/Article.jsp?id=h-2433) and (http://www.answers.com/topic/charlayne-hunter-gault).

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Mommie Blessings,

Saved M.O.M.