Hunter-Gault, Charlayne 1942–

PERSONAL:

Born February 27, 1942, in Due West, SC; daughter of Charles S.H., Jr. (a minister and chaplain), and Althea Hunter; married Walter Stovall (divorced); married Ronald T. Gault (an investment banker), September 17, 1973; children: (first marriage) Susan Stovall; (second marriage) Chuma. Education: University of Georgia, A.B., 1963.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Johannesburg, South Africa. Office—CNN, 1 CNN Center NW, Box 105366, Atlanta, GA 30347-5366.

CAREER:

Journalist, New Yorker, New York, NY, "Talk of the Town" reporter, beginning 1963; Trans-Action (magazine), former staff member; WRC-TV, Washington, DC, former investigative reporter and news anchor; New York Times, New York, NY, began as metropolitan reporter, became Harlem bureau chief, beginning 1968; MacNeil/Lehrer Report (became MacNeil/Lehrer News-Hour, 1983), PBS-TV, correspondent, 1978-97; National Public Radio, Washington, DC, chief correspondent in Africa, 1997-99; Cable News Network (CNN), Atlanta, GA, Johannesburg bureau chief and African correspondent, beginning 1999, then African correspondent for National Public Radio. Correspondent for programs, including Learning in America, MacNeil/Lehrer Productions, 1989, and for Rights and Wrongs (weekly news magazine), 1993-96. Former adjunct professor of journalism, Columbia University.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Journalist of the Year, National Association of Black Journalists, 1986; Russell Sage fellowship; Distinguished Urban Reporting Award, National Urban Coalition; two George Foster Peabody Awards for Excellence in Broadcast Journalism, University of Georgia; Broadcast Personality of the Year Award, Good Housekeeping; American Women in Radio and Television Award; awards for excellence in local programming, Corporation for Public Broadcasting; Emmy Awards, Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, for outstanding coverage of a single breaking news story, and for outstanding background/analysis of a single current story (segments); Sidney Hillman Award, 1990, for television series Out of Reach: People at the Bottom; over two dozen honorary degrees from colleges and universities, including University of Massachusetts and Morehouse College.

WRITINGS:

In My Place (memoir), Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 1992.

New News out of Africa: Uncovering Africa's Renaissance, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 2006.

Contributor to periodicals, including New York Times Magazine, Essence, New York Times Book Review, Saturday Review, New Yorker, and Vogue.

SIDELIGHTS:

Charlayne Hunter-Gault is a broadcast journalist who has served as an investigative correspondent and anchorwoman on television and radio. Best known for her twenty-year tenure with Public Broadcasting System (PBS)'s MacNeil/Lehrer News-Hour, Hunter-Gault has covered breaking events in the United States, the Middle East, Europe, and Africa, and she has interviewed numerous important international figures, such as former South Africa president Nelson Mandela. In 1999 Hunter-Gault became South African bureau chief for the Cable News Network (CNN), and from that base she has traveled widely in Africa to report on news events and political trends. Honored with Emmy Awards and George Foster Peabody awards for her work in television journalism, Hunter-Gault is one of the best known African-American women broadcasters at work today.

A younger generation might not know that Hunter-Gault was a pioneer in the civil rights movement. In 1961 she and Hamilton Holmes became the first two black students at the University of Georgia. She recalled what it was like to be on the front lines of desegregation in her memoir, In My Place. The author begins with a pleasant account of her childhood in the Deep South (and, for a brief period, Alaska), describing school and church activities. A gifted student, Hunter-Gault decided in high school she was going to be a journalist and applied to a number of colleges. Although she was accepted at Wayne State University in Detroit, Hunter-Gault was "encouraged by local civil rights leaders to apply … to the University of Georgia," according to a Kirkus Reviews contributor. The same reviewer commented that Hunter-Gault's account of facing racial prejudice there is "remarkably generous." Indeed, Hunter-Gault told Publishers Weekly that "the people who attacked me didn't know me." The author added: "They stood outside my dormitory and threw rocks, but it was the idea, not the person they were against." In My Place concludes with Hunter-Gault's graduation from college and presents her "stirring" 1988 University of Georgia commencement speech "as a sort of epilog," commented Gwen Gregory in Library Journal. A contributor to Publishers Weekly considered the work a "warmhearted, well-observed memoir" and believed "that Hunter-Gault could write a rich sequel."

If she does pen a sequel, Hunter-Gault will certainly have enough accomplishments to fill a second book. She went to work at the New Yorker and the New York Times in the 1960s, covering the civil rights movement and urban race riots. She joined the MacNeil/Lehrer Report in 1978 as a national correspondent and anchor-woman and stayed with the PBS nightly newscast for nearly twenty years. When her duties allowed, she also served as a reporter for numerous PBS specials on human rights and on breaking political stories such as the Gulf War and the civil war in Yugoslavia. Her move to Africa in 1997 was undertaken on both a professional and personal front, as her husband had a position with a banking firm in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Reporting first for National Public Radio, and more recently for CNN, Hunter-Gault has helped to cast African news reporting in a more optimistic light. Her dispatches from South Africa reveal a continent full of nations that are industrializing, improving the lot of their citizens, and making important strides in the areas of human rights and desegregation. As she noted in Essence: "There are dynamics here [in Africa] that seem to be delivering something new not only for the continent but also for the world in the coming century."

The journalist told Frazier Moore in the Detroit News: "I like to think of myself as a journalist who is (a) a woman, (b) black, and (c) out of a particular historical experience, and all of the above have had an impact on my values and perspective. It's not the sort of baggage you carry from a lifetime of experience, not in the sense of a yoke or a millstone, but in the Louis Vuitton sense of baggage."

After making her home in South Africa for several years and serving as a correspondent there for both CNN and National Public Radio, Hunter-Gault wrote New News out of Africa: Uncovering Africa's Renaissance. "The book grew out of three … lectures that I gave at Harvard University," Hunter-Gault told Jason Zasky in an interview for Failure.mag.com. "The audiences were very interested in Africa, but I could tell from the questions they asked that they didn't have a clue about [recent] developments on the continent. The questions revolved around what I call the four D's of the African apocalypse—death, disease, disaster and despair. When I sat down to write the book I tried to focus on things I thought were important for Americans to know about Africa."

In New News out of Africa Hunter-Gault writes about various positive or improving aspects of life on the continent of Africa, including the progressive democracy in South Africa. She also sheds light on a changing Africa through the prism of her own experiences growing up during the civil rights movement in the United States. Writing in African Business, a contributor noted that "Hunter-Gault argues that America's knowledge of the continent is hugely distorted by the dictum ‘if it bleeds, it leads’—in other words, only Africa's conflicts and disasters make the news. Hunter-Gault illustrates how pervasive this editorial policy is by telling us that just three years after the democratic dispensation that saw a relatively peaceful transition to majority rule in South Africa, three US broadcasters quit the country, leaving only CNN with a local bureau."

Reviewers praised New News out of Africa. "With more than 40 years of experience in the industry, Hunter-Gault has painted a poignantly complex picture of Africa in her latest book," wrote Robtel Neajai Pailey on the News America Media Web site. Despite the author's emphasis on improvements in African life, reviewers observed that Hunter-Gault includes both sides of the story. For example, Todd Steven Burroughs, writing in Black Issues Book Review, commented that "she takes the reader deep into the post-apartheid era, warts and all." In a review in the Library Journal, James Thorsen called the book "a well-researched, fact-filled account of recent positive changes in Africa."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Hunter-Gault, Charlayne, In My Place, Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 1992.

PERIODICALS

African Business, November, 2006, review of New News out of Africa: Uncovering Africa's Renaissance, p. 78.

American Scholar, summer, 2006, David Chanoff, review of New News out of Africa, p. 126.

Black Issues Book Review, July-August 2006, Todd Steven Burroughs, review of New News out of Africa, p. 40.

Booklist, June 1, 2006, Vanessa Bush, review of New News out of Africa, p. 22.

Broadcasting & Cable, May 17, 1999, "Coverage of Africa on National Public Radio," p. 12.

Columbia Journalism Review, July-August, 2006, James Boylan, review of New News out of Africa, p. 61.

Detroit News, June 27, 1997, Frazier Moore, "Charlayne Hunter-Gault's Next Stop: Reporting in Africa."

Ebony, July, 2006, review of New News out of Africa, p. 30.

Essence, May, 2000, Charlayne Hunter-Gault, "Freedom's Promise," p. 203.

Kirkus Reviews, September 1, 1992, review of In My Place, pp. 1106-1107; April 15, 2006, review of New News out of Africa, p. 391.

Library Journal, October 15, 1992, Gwen Gregory, review of In My Place, p. 74; June 15, 2006, James Thorsen, review of New News out of Africa, p. 87.

New Statesman, August 28, 2006, Karolin Schaps, review of New News out of Africa, p. 51.

Publishers Weekly, August 17, 1992, interview with Hunter-Gault, pp. 36, 40; September 7, 1992, review of In My Place, pp. 83-84; April 3, 2006, review of New News out of Africa, p. 54.

ONLINE

Africa Files,http://www.africafiles.org/ (May 4, 2007), review of New News out of Africa.

allAfrica.com,http://allafrica.com/ (October 6, 2006), interview with author.

BookPage,http://www.bookpage.com/ (May 4, 2007), Anne Bartlett, review of New News out of Africa.

Failure Online,http://www.failuremag.com/ (May 4, 2007), Jason Zasky, interview with Hunter-Gault.

Foreign Policy Association Web site,http://www.fpa.org/ May 4, 2007), review of New News out of Africa.

Global Policy Forum Web site,http://www.globalpolicy.org/ (July 31, 2006), Kimi Paull, "It Shouldn't Have to Bleed to Lead," review of New News out of Africa.

Harvard University Gazette Online,http://www.hno.harvard.edu/gazette/ (May 4, 2007), Beth Potier, review of New News out of Africa.

History Makers,http://www.thehistorymakers.com/ (May 4, 2007), "Charlayne Hunter-Gault."

Inthefray.org,http://inthefray.org/ (December 30, 2006), Nicole Marie Pezold, review of New News out of Africa.

MVGazette.com,http://www.mvgazette.com/ (May 4, 2007), James Kinsella, "From Oak Bluffs to South Africa: A Life, a Career.

News America Media Web site,http://news.newamericamedia.org/ (July 10, 2006), Robtel Neajai Pailey, "Acclaimed Journalist Tells Africa Correspondents to ‘Come in Right.’"

Online NewsHour Forum,http://www.pbs.org/newshour/forum/ (October 18, 2000), "Charlayne Hunter-Gault Farewell Forum."

Smithsonian Online,http://www.smithsonianmagazine.com/ (May 4, 2007), Amy Crawford, interview with the author.