Charlayne Hunter-Gault
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Charlayne Hunter-Gault (born Charlayne Hunter on February 27, 1942, in Due West, South Carolina) is currently a foreign correspondent with National Public Radio. She is on the board of the Committee to Protect Journalists. She was the Johannesburg, South Africa bureau chief for CNN from 1999 - 2005. She is a former chief national correspondent for PBS (The Newshour with Jim Lehrer) (1983 - 1997) and a former chief correspondent in Africa for NPR (1997 - 1999). Additionally, she was the first African-American reporter for The New Yorker (1963), was an investigative reporter and anchorwoman for WRC-TV (1967 - 1968), and also wrote for the New York Times for more than ten years, where she won the distinguished New York Times' Publisher Award.
Ms. Hunter-Gault won two Peabody Awards and two Emmy Awards for her work on the series "Apartheid's People." She also received the Journalist of the Year Award from the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ) in 1986 and was inducted into the National Association of Black Journalists' Hall of Fame in 2005.
In 1961 she and Hamilton E. Holmes were the first African-American students to attend the University of Georgia, ending racial segregation at that institution. Her dormitory, Myers Hall, became the center of racial riots early in her tenure there. Despite the turmoil, she graduated from the University of Georgia in 1963 with a Bachelor of Arts in Journalism (A.B.J.) from the Henry W. Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication. The academic building at the University of Georgia where she and Holmes registered for classes was renamed the Hunter-Holmes Academic Building in 2001.
In 2005 a memorial to Hunter-Gault in the Myers Hall dormitory at the University of Georgia drew criticism for the use of an un-attributed racial slur. Hunter-Gault herself petitioned for its inclusion in the memorial as being of historical value, but it was ultimately replaced with a quote from her book In My Place, along with her letter to the student paper[1] supporting the slur's use following intensive regional media attention and protest by the campus branch of the NAACP[2].
She is a member of Delta Sigma Theta, the second intercollegiate Greek-letter oganization established for African American women.
[edit] Publications
- In My Place. Memoir, 1992. ISBN 0-679-74818-0.
- New News Out of Africa: Uncovering Africa's Renaissance, 2006. ISBN 0-19-517747-9.
