Charlayne Hunter-Gault

Alberta Charlayne Hunter-Gault (born February 27, 1942) is an American civil rights activist, journalist and former foreign correspondent for National Public Radio, CNN, and the Public Broadcasting Service. Charlayne Hunter and Hamilton Holmes were the first African-American students to attend the University of Georgia. Her mother brought her up, as her father was frequently away.

In 1955, one year after the Brown v. Board of Education ruling, Hunter was in eighth grade and was the only black student at an Army school in Alaska, where her father was stationed. Her parents divorced after spending the year in Alaska, and Hunter moved to Atlanta with her mother, two brothers, and maternal grandmother.

After moving to Atlanta, she attended Henry McNeal Turner High School where she became editor-in-chief of The Green Light, the school's newspaper, assistant yearbook editor, and "Miss Turner High".

The two were initially rejected by the university on the grounds that there was no more room in the dorms for incoming freshmen who were required to live there. After winning the case, Holmes and Hunter became the first two African-American students to enroll in the University of Georgia on January 9, 1961.

Career

In 1967, Hunter joined the investigative news team at WRC-TV, Washington, D.C., and anchored the local evening news. In 1968, Hunter-Gault joined The New York Times as a metropolitan reporter specializing in coverage of the urban black community. She joined The MacNeil/Lehrer Report in 1978 as a correspondent, becoming The NewsHour'''s national correspondent in 1983. She left The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer in June 1997. She worked in Johannesburg, South Africa, as National Public Radio's chief correspondent in Africa (1997–99). Hunter-Gault then joined CNN as its Johannesburg bureau chief and correspondent in 1999. She exited this role in 2005, although she still regularly appeared on the network and others, as an Africa specialist.

During her association with The NewsHour, Hunter-Gault won additional awards: two Emmys and a Peabody for excellence in broadcast journalism for her work on Apartheid's People, a NewsHour series on South Africa. She also received the 1986 Journalist of the Year Award from the National Association of Black Journalists, a Candace Award for Journalism from the National Coalition of 100 Black Women in 1988, the 1990 Sidney Hillman Award, the Good Housekeeping Broadcast Personality of the Year Award, the Women in Radio and Television Award and two awards from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting for excellence in local programming. The University of Georgia Academic Building is named for her, along with Hamilton Holmes, as it is called the Holmes/Hunter Academic Building, as of 2001. She has been a member of the Peabody Awards Board of Jurors since 2009 and serves on the board of trustees at the Carter Center.

Hunter-Gault published In My Place in 1992 which was a memoir about her experiences at the University of Georgia.

Personal life While in high school, at the age of 16, Hunter, along with two friends, converted to Catholicism after being raised as a follower of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. The couple was first married in March 1963 and then remarried in Detroit, Michigan, on June 8, 1963, because they believed that, since he was white, the first ceremony might be considered invalid as well as criminal, based on laws about interracial marriages in the unidentified state in which they had been married. Once the marriage was revealed, the governor of Georgia called it "a shame and a disgrace", while Georgia's attorney general made public statements about prosecuting the mixed-race couple under Georgia law. News reports quoted the parents of both bride and groom as being against the marriage for reasons of race.

Following her divorce from Walter Stovall, Hunter married Ronald T. Gault, a black businessman who was then a program officer for the Ford Foundation. Later, he became an investment banker and consultant. They have one son, Chuma Gault, an actor (born 1972). After moving back to the United States, the couple maintain a home in Massachusetts, where they remain active supporters of the arts.

Filmography Dare to Struggle... Dare to Win (1999) Globalization & Human Rights (1998) Rights & Wrongs: Human Rights Television (1993) Summer of Soul (2021)

Publications

"A Trip to Leverton" The New Yorker (April 24, 1965). A short story-memoir "The Talk of the Town: Notes and Comment" The New Yorker 60/52 (February 11, 1985): 28–29. Talk piece about Darrell Cabey, shot by Bernhard Goetz