Alberta Charlayne Hunter was born in Due West, South Carolina, daughter of Col. Charles Shepherd Henry Hunter, Jr., U.S. Army, a regimental chaplain, and his wife, the former Althea Ruth Brown.[3][4] She became interested in journalism at the age of 12 after reading the comic strip Brenda Starr, Reporter.[2]
In 1955, one year after the Brown v. Board of Education ruling, Hunter was in eighth grade andwas 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.[5]
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".[5]
In 1958, members of the Atlanta Committee for Cooperative Action (ACCA) began to search for high-achieving African-American seniors who attended high schools in Atlanta. They were interested in jump-starting the integration of white universities in Georgia. They were searching for the best students so that universities would have no reason to reject them other than race. Hunter, along with Hamilton Holmes were the two students selected by the committee to integrate Georgia State College (later Georgia State University) in Atlanta. However, Hunter and Holmes were more interested in attending the University of Georgia.[6]
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.[5] That fall, Hunter enrolled at Wayne University (later Wayne State University) where she received assistance from the Georgia tuition program on the basis that there were no black universities in the state who offered a journalism program.[2]
Despite meeting the qualifications to transfer to the University of Georgia, she and Holmes were rejected every quarter due to the fact that there was no room for them in the dorms, but transfer students in similar situations were admitted.[5] This led to court case Holmes v. Danner, in which the registrar of the university, Walter Danner, was the defendant.[7] 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.[2]
Hunter graduated in 1963 with a B.A. in journalism.[8]
Career
Hunter-Gault in 1975
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,[9] although she still regularly appeared on the network and others, as an Africa specialist.
Shortly before she was graduated from the University of Georgia, Hunter married a classmate, Walter L. Stovall, the writer son of a chicken-feed manufacturer.[3][14] 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.[15] 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.[3][14][16] News reports quoted the parents of both bride and groom as being against the marriage for reasons of race.[3] Years later, after the couple's 1972 divorce, Hunter-Gault gave a speech at the university in which she praised Stovall, who, she said, "unhesitatingly jumped into my boat with me. He gave up going to movies because he knew I couldn't get a seat in the segregated theaters. He gave up going to the Varsity because he knew they would not serve me... We married, despite the uproar we knew it would cause, because we loved each other." Shortly after their marriage, Stovall was quoted as saying, "We are two young people who found ourselves in love and did what we feel is required of people when they are in love and want to spend the rest of their lives together. We got married."[15] The couple had one daughter, Suesan Stovall, a singer (born December 1963).[17]
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).[18] The couple lived in Johannesburg, South Africa, where they also produced wine for a label called Passages.[18][19][20][21] After moving back to the United States, the couple maintain a home in Massachusetts, where they remain active supporters of the arts.[22]
Hunter-Gault, Charlayne (July 27, 2020). "Hughes at Columbia". The Talk of the Town. December 30, 1967. The New Yorker. Vol.96, no.21. pp.12–13.[23]
Valade, Roger M.; Kasinec, Denise (1996). The Schomburg Center Guide to Black Literature: From the Eighteenth Century to the Present. Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Detroit: Gale Research. pp.214–215. ISBN0-7876-0289-2. OCLC32924112.
Hamilton E. Holmes was an American orthopedic physician. He and Charlayne Hunter-Gault were the first two African-American students admitted to the University of Georgia. Additionally, Holmes was the first African-American student to attend the Emory University School of Medicine, where he earned his M.D. degree in 1967, later becoming a professor of orthopedics and associate dean at the school.
Horace Julian Bond was an American social activist, leader of the civil rights movement, politician, professor, and writer. While he was a student at Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia, during the early 1960s, he helped establish the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). In 1971, he co-founded the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Alabama, and served as its first president for nearly a decade.
Samuel Ernest Vandiver Jr. was an American Democratic Party politician who was the 73rd governor of Georgia from 1959 to 1963.
Ralph Emerson McGill was an American journalist and editorialist. An anti-segregationist editor, he published the Atlanta Constitution newspaper. He was a member of the Peabody Awards Board of Jurors, serving from 1945 to 1968. He won a Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing in 1959.
Donald Lee Hollowell was an American civil rights attorney during the Civil Rights Movement, in the state of Georgia. He successfully sued to integrate Atlanta's public schools, Georgia colleges, universities and public transit, freed Martin Luther King Jr. from prison, and mentored civil rights attorneys. The first black regional director of a federal agency, Hollowell is best remembered for his instrumental role in winning the desegregation of the University of Georgia in 1961. He is the subject of a 2010 documentary film, Donald L. Hollowell: Foot Soldier for Equal Justice.
Glenda A. Hatchett, known professionally as Judge Hatchett, is an American television personality, lawyer, and judge who is the star of the former court show, Judge Hatchett and current day The Verdict with Judge Hatchett, and founding partner at the national law firm, The Hatchett Firm.
Xernona Clayton Brady is an American civil rights leader and broadcasting executive. During the Civil Rights Movement, she worked for the National Urban League and Southern Christian Leadership Conference, where she became involved in the work of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Later, Clayton went into television, where she became the first African American from the southern United States to host a daily prime time talk show. She became corporate vice president for Turner Broadcasting.
The Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication is a constituent college of the University of Georgia in Athens, Georgia, United States. Established in 1915, Grady College offers undergraduate degrees in journalism, advertising, public relations, and entertainment and media studies, and master's and doctoral programs of study.
Omer Clyde "O.C." Aderhold was President of the University of Georgia (UGA) in Athens from 1950 until 1967.
Jesse Hill Jr. was an African American civil rights activist. He was active in the civic and business communities of the city for more than five decades. Hill was president and chief executive officer of the Atlanta Life Insurance Company, from 1973 to 1992, and was the first African American to be elected president of a chamber of commerce in a major city. During Hill's presidency of the Atlanta Life Insurance Company it became the largest black-owned life insurance company in the nation. He was a member of the board of directors for the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta.
Valerie Boyd was an American writer and academic. She was best known for her biography of Zora Neale Hurston entitled Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston. She was an associate professor and the Charlayne Hunter-Gault Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Georgia, where she taught narrative nonfiction writing, as well as arts and literary journalism.
The Georgia Council on Human Relations (GCHR) was a biracial group working against prejudice and discrimination due to race, religion, ethnicity, and nationality. Non-profit, interracial, and non-denominational, at its peak the GCHR operated in ten chapters across the state, including Albany, Atlanta, Augusta, Columbus, LaGrange, Macon, and Savannah. GCHR was the Southern Regional Council's Georgia affiliate.
Ruby Hurley was an American civil rights activist. She was a leader in the Civil Rights Movement and administrator for the NAACP, and was known as the "queen of civil rights".
In the United States, school integration is the process of ending race-based segregation within American public and private schools. Racial segregation in schools existed throughout most of American history and remains an issue in contemporary education. During the Civil Rights Movement school integration became a priority, but since then de facto segregation has again become prevalent.
This is a timeline of the civil rights movement in the United States, a nonviolent mid-20th century freedom movement to gain legal equality and the enforcement of constitutional rights for people of color. The goals of the movement included securing equal protection under the law, ending legally institutionalized racial discrimination, and gaining equal access to public facilities, education reform, fair housing, and the ability to vote.
Melvyn Rosenman Leventhal is an American attorney known for his work as a community organizer and lawyer in the 1960s–70s Civil Rights Movement. From 1969 to 1974 he served as the Lead Counsel in Mississippi for the Legal Defense Fund, the litigation arm of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). After returning to New York, he served as a staff attorney for LDF for several more years. He also practiced business law.
The Atlanta Inquirer was founded on July 31, 1960 by Jesse Hill, Herman J. Russell, and various students of the Atlanta Student Movement including Julian Bond, Charlayne Hunter-Gault, Lonnie King, and many other students in the Atlanta University Center. It was the second black newspaper published in Atlanta. M. Carl Holman, a professor at Clark College, became the editor of the newspaper after the first issue, which had been edited by Bill Strong. The paper was a radical response to the conservative Atlanta Daily World which was the first black newspaper in Atlanta.The Inquirer reported on black leadership in the civil rights movement in Atlanta. After being bought by the family of a longtime employee of the paper, John B. Smith Sr., he became the publisher, editor, and chief executive officer of the newspaper until his death in 2017. The Atlanta Inquirer is also a member of the National Newspaper Association where John B. Smith Sr. was the chairman.
The Atlanta sit-ins were a series of sit-ins that took place in Atlanta, Georgia, United States. Occurring during the sit-in movement of the larger civil rights movement, the sit-ins were organized by the Committee on Appeal for Human Rights, which consisted of students from the Atlanta University Center. The sit-ins were inspired by the Greensboro sit-ins, which had started a month earlier in Greensboro, North Carolina with the goal of desegregating the lunch counters in the city. The Atlanta protests lasted for almost a year before an agreement was made to desegregate the lunch counters in the city.
The University of Georgia desegregation riot was an incident of mob violence by proponents of racial segregation on January 11, 1961. The riot was caused by segregationists' protest over the desegregation of the University of Georgia (UGA) in Athens, Georgia following the enrollment of Hamilton E. Holmes and Charlayne Hunter, two African American students. The two had been admitted to the school several days earlier following a lengthy application process that led to a court order mandating that the university accept them. On January 11, several days after the two had registered, a group of approximately 1,000 people conducted a riot outside of Hunter's dormitory. In the aftermath, Holmes and Hunter were suspended by the university's dean, though this suspension was later overturned by a court order. Several rioters were arrested, with several students placed on disciplinary probation, but no one was charged with inciting the riot. In an investigation conducted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, it was revealed that some of the riot organizers were in contact with elected state officials who approved of the riot and assured them of immunity for conducting the riot.
Roy Vincent Harris was an American politician and newspaper publisher in the U.S. state of Georgia during the mid-1900s. From the 1920s until the 1940s, Harris served several terms in both the Georgia House of Representatives and the Georgia State Senate, and was twice the speaker of the house, from 1937 to 1940 and again from 1943 to 1946. Historian Harold Paulk Henderson has called Harris "one of Georgia's most capable behind-the-scenes politicians".
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