Hunter-Gault, Charlayne

By: Lisa Clayton Robinson

Source:

 Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition

Hunter-Gault, Charlayne

Sex:  Female

Born:  Due West, South Carolina, United States
27 February 1942

Activity/Profession:  Print Journalist, Broadcast Journalist

1942–
African American journalist

Born in Due West, South Carolina, in 1942, Charlayne Hunter-Gault first came to national attention in 1961 when she and Hamilton Holmes became the first black students to attend the University of Georgia, after a two-year-long court fight. Hunter-Gault received her B.A. in journalism from the university in 1963.

After graduation, she took a job with the New Yorker magazine. In 1967 she received a Russell Sage Fellowship to study social science at Washington University, St. Louis, where she was an editor at Trans-Action magazine. She also became a reporter and anchorwoman for WRC-TV. In 1968, Hunter-Gault joined the New York Times, where she created and managed a Harlem bureau. Hunter-Gault spent several years as codirector of the Michele Clark Fellowship program for minority students in journalism at Columbia University. In 1971 she married Ronald Gault, with whom she has a son; she also has a daughter from a previous marriage.

In 1978, Hunter-Gault began to work as a correspondent for PBS's The MacNeil/Lehrer Report, where she became national correspondent in 1983. Hunter-Gault's accomplishments have been widely recognized by her peers. In 1986, she received the George Foster Peabody Award for Excellence in Broadcast Journalism, and the Journalist of the Year Award from the National Association of Black Journalists. She has also won the National Urban Coalition Award for Distinguished Urban Reporting, and two national news and documentary Emmy Awards. Hunter-Gault published her autobiography in 1992, and in 1997 left PBS and moved to Johannesburg, South Africa, where she was chief correspondent for National Public Radio (NPR). She became a bureau chief and correspondent for Cable News Network (CNN) in South Africa in 1999.

In 2001 the University of Georgia dedicated the Holmes-Hunter Academic Building in honor of Hunter-Gault and Holmes.

See also Segregation in the United States.

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