Hunter-Gault, Charlayne 1942–

Charlayne Hunter-Gault 1942–

Journalist

At a Glance…

Future Reporter Becomes Important Newsmaker

Attacked Prejudiced Editorial Policy

Acclaimed Memoir Puts Life in Perspective

Selected writings

Sources

Charlayne Hunter-Gault has staked her claim as one of the leading journalists in the United States, having won many of the top honors in her field for excellence in investigative reporting. One of the springboards into her career came when she herself was the subject of joumalistic investigation at the height of the civil rights era: In 1961, Hunter-Gault was one of two black students who first broke the color barrier in higher education in Georgia. While braving the protests of white students during that tumultuous time in American history, she also underwent an important learning experience by observing the styles and techniques of reporters who chronicled the event.

Hunter-Gault has built a reputation as a keen investigator of social injustice, especially among African Americans. She is known to millions of television viewers as the national correspondent on PBS-TV’s MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour and has also written landmark articles on subjects ranging from the ravages of heroin addiction to the evils of apartheid in South Africa.

Born in 1942 in the small town of Due West, South Carolina, Hunter-Gault was one of three children of Charles and Althea Hunter. Her father was a Methodist army chaplain who often served long tours of duty away from home, leaving the care of the children to Charlayne’s mother and grandmother.

The resilience and pride that have served Hunter-Gault well in her career owe a lot to the strong values passed on to her during her formative years. She has often cited her grandmother as a key role model. Though not educated beyond the third grade, her grandmother read three newspapers a day and helped spark a healthy curiosity about the world in the future award-winning reporter. Hunter-Gault’s father was also a critical influence, despite his frequent absences. “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.

Hunter-Gault’s first encounter with prejudice over race occurred when she was a child: she was mocked by other black children for having a light complexion. Her early childhood years were spent in Covington, South Carolina (where the television series In the Heat of the Night is filmed). But in 1951 the family moved to Atlanta, and 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.” Her

At a Glance…

Born Charlayne Hunter, February 27, 1942, in Due West, SC; daughter of Charles S. H., Jr. (a Methodist army chaplain) and Althea Hunter; married Walter Stovall (a journalist and writer), 1963 (divorced); married Ronald Gault (an investment banker), 1971; children: Susan (with Stovall); Chuma (with Gault). Education: Attended Wayne State University, 1959-61; University of Georgia, Athens, B.A., 1963; Russell Sage Fellow at Washington University, St. Louis, c. 1967-68.

Wrote for the New Yorker, 1964-67; New York Times, 1968-77, became Harlem bureau chief; MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour, New York City, general correspondent, 1978-83, national correspondent and substitute anchor, 1983—.

Awards: New York Times Publisher Awards, 1970 (with Joseph Lelyveld), 1974, and 1976; George Foster Peabody Broadcasting Award, 1986; named Journalist of the Year by the National Association of Black Journalists, 1986; Good Housekeeping Broadcast Personality of the Year Award; American Women in Radio and Television Award for excellence in journalism; Woman of Achievement Award from the New York Chapter of the American Society of University Women; Newswomen’s Club of New York Front Page Award; two National News and Documentary Emmy Awards; National Urban Coalition Award for distinguished urban reporting; Lincoln University Unity Award.

Addresses: Office—MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour, WNET-TV, 356 West 58th St., New York, NY 10019.

hero at the time was Brenda Starr, the comic-strip reporter.

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. She edited the school newspaper and wrote for a community weekly during her high school years. Much to her disappointment, though, the family went to Alaska in the mid-1950s to live where her father was stationed at the time. Hunter-Gault attended a school there that had no other students of color, and she had to enter a lower grade because her school in the South lagged academically behind white schools. The entire family returned to Georgia after a year, and Hunter-Gault went back to Turner High School. She became the school’s homecoming queen and graduated number three in her class in 1959.

Future Reporter Becomes Important Newsmaker

The University of Georgia’s practice of barring black students made it impossible for Hunter-Gault to attend the only college in her state that had a journalism school. Her opportunity to overcome that restriction came when she, along with fellow Turner High student Hamilton Holmes, was recruited by civil rights leaders who wanted to break the color line in Georgia education. Georgia State University was originally selected as the school to be integrated. However, Holmes suggested that they go to the University of Georgia because it offered a better quality education, and Hunter-Gault agreed. Despite the historic significance of entering a previously whites-only college, Hunter-Gault said that she was not motivated to be such a symbol. Quoted in Essence magazine, she said, “To become a historic symbol was not the point of what I did. The point of what I did was to have access to the best education I could in the state to become a journalist.”

Hunter-Gault attended Wayne State University in Detroit for a year and a half before the courts opened the door to her entry into the University of Georgia. When she and her mother finally arrived on the Georgia campus in 1961, white students converged on their car and started rocking it until they were chased away by a dean. Two nights later, a crowd 1,000-strong gathered outside her dormitory, one of them heaving a brick through a window. According to an article in Essence, during these riots a white woman went up to Hunter-Gault and tossed a quarter at her feet, saying, “Here, nigger, do my sheets.” Hunter-Gault and Holmes were suspended for their own safety, then ordered by a federal court to return the next day.

Although Hunter-Gault was occasionally threatened during her stay at the university—and faculty members often stood guard outside her classes to make sure she was not abused—she 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.” Shortly before earning her journalism degree in 1963, Hunter-Gault secretly married fellow journalism student Walter Stovall, who was white. Although they were divorced several years later due to diverging career paths, they have remained close friends. (Hunter became Hunter-Gault in 1971 when she married Ronald Gault, an investment banker.)

Part of Hunter-Gault’s training for her career turned out to be her exposure to the throng of journalists who followed the story of her enrollment at the University of Georgia. Her observations of reporters in action served as an apprenticeship in the art of interviewing. During the summers of her college years, Hunter-Gault further honed her reporting skills by working for the Inquirer, a black Atlanta newspaper.

After graduating in 1963, Hunter and her husband moved to New York City and had a daughter. Her first job was as a secretary at the New Yorker, a position she accepted on the condition that she be considered for future writing assignments. From 1964 to 1967 she contributed pieces to the “Talk of the Town” feature section of the magazine, and she also wrote short stories. Then she received a Russell Sage Fellowship to study social science at Washington University in St. Louis. During that study period she also edited articles for Trans-Action magazine.

Attacked Prejudiced Editorial Policy

While covering a story in Washington, D.C., Hunter-Gault was hired by WRC-TV, an NBC affiliate, as an investigative reporter and anchor of the local evening news program. In 1968 she accepted a position with the metropolitan staff of the New York Times and later created the post of Harlem bureau chief. During this tenure she wrote a scathing memo to top editors objecting to their practice of changing the term “black” to “Negro” in her pieces; she went on to attack the presumptions her white bosses seemed to be making about people of color. Her points were taken to heart, and the Times adopted the word “black” as standard usage. “Nowadays it seems almost silly,” she was quoted as saying in People magazine. “But it was one of those defining moments in the history of black journalism in major white institutions.”

Her next stop on the journalism career track came in 1978 when she became a correspondent for the MacNeil / Lehrer Report, later renamed the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour. Five years later, she was promoted to national correspondent and fill-in anchor. Her skills as an interviewer resulted in her meeting with some of the most famous people in the world, including British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, archbishop of Cape Town Desmond Tutu, U.S. president George Bush, U.S. Army general Norman Schwarzkopf, German statesman and chancellor Helmut Schmidt, and comedian and business mogul Bill Cosby. Hunter-Gault was one of the first correspondents allowed into the West Indian nation of Grenada after the American-led invasion in 1983, and also reported on location during the Gulf War. She won an Emmy Award for her Grenada coverage, as well as one for her report on Admiral Zumwalt, who authorized the spraying of Agent Orange in Vietnam and unwittingly poisoned his own son. In 1986 Hunter-Gault was named Journalist of the Year by the National Association of Black Journalists. Most cherished among her honors, though, is the George Foster Peabody Broadcasting A ward presented to her in 1986 by the H. W. Grady School of Journalism at the University of Georgia for her documentary Apartheid’s People.

Hunter-Gault strives to find the essence of her investigative subjects and remain objective in her reporting. Both as a television journalist and a writer, she has produced riveting stories about racial prejudice, the underclass in the United States, and a host of other pressing social concerns.

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 banker 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?”

Acclaimed Memoir Puts Life in Perspective

In 1992 Charlayne Hunter-Gault produced a much-praised account of her life entitled In My Place. In it she recalls her early years growing up black and female in the Deep South, as well as the turmoil of entering the University of Georgia. Her book downplays her own courage in living through the adversity of her college years, giving credit instead to the black community and her family for supporting her and paving the way for her giant step forward.

In My Place is a stirring story of Hunter-Gault’s journey from a world of segregation—attending schools in the South where children often had no textbooks—to a world of international exposure—covering events of worldwide impact for a major news show. Most vivid of all is her recounting of the injustice and horror of her first days at the University of Georgia, when riots ignited around her. As she noted in the book’s prologue: “We would be greeted by mobs of white students who, within forty-eight hours would hurl epithets, burn crosses and black effigies, and finally stage a riot outside my dormitory while nearby state patrolmen ignored the call from university officials to come and intervene.” The impact of In My Place was not lost on the critics, either. 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.”

In fitting recognition of her personal success—and the social, economic, and political advancements people of color have been making in the United States over the past few decades—Charlayne Hunter-Gault was asked to deliver the commencement address at the University of Georgia in 1988. She was the first African American to do so in the school’s history. 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.” Clearly, she has lived up to these words, having held her ground against frightening adversity on that same campus back in 1961 and having become a voice of consciousness in the field of American broadcast journalism.

Selected writings

In My Place, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1992.

Former writer for the New Yorker and the New York Times. Author of numerous articles for Vogue and other magazines.

Sources

Books

Hunter-Gault, Charlayne, In My Place, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1992.

Lanker, Brian, I Dream a World: Portraits of Black Women Who Changed the World, Stewart, Tabori & Chang, 1989, p. 62.

Periodicals

Atlanta Journal and Constitution, October 25, 1992, p. N-l; January 12, 1993, p. D-l.

Atlantic, December 1992, p. 151.

Boston Globe, January 31, 1993, sec. BGM, p. 9.

Essence, March 1987, pp. 41-42, 110.

Fortune, November 2, 1992, pp. 118-19.

Jet, March 1, 1993, p. 30.

Los Angeles Times, December 17, 1987, sec. VI, p. 1; June 12, 1988, p. 1-4; November 30, 1992, p. E-l.

New Yorker, December 21, 1992, p. 135.

New York Times Magazine, January 25, 1970, pp. 24-25, 50.

People, December 7, 1992, pp. 73-76.

Southern Living, June 1990, pp. 78-83.

USA Today, July 16, 1993, p. A-13.

—Ed Decker