Keynote Speaker
Charlayne Hunter-Gault
Monday, January 31, 2011
7:00 p.m.
Apollo Multipurpose Room
WSU Student Union
Free & Open to the Public
No Tickets or Registration Required
Born in February 1942 in Due West, South Carolina, Charlayne Hunter-Gault is an
award-winning journalist with more than 40 years’ experience in the field of journalism. She is the author of In My Place, a memoir of the civil rights movement,
fashioned around her experiences as the first black woman to attend the University
of Georgia where she earned a degree in journalism in 1963. Her latest book, New
News Out of Africa: Uncovering the African Renaissance, documents recent positive
developments in Africa.
Growing up, Hunter-Gault attended a prestigious black public high school in Atlanta,
Henry McNeal Turner High, where she was an active member of the school newspaper, the student council, and the honor society. When conducting her college search,
Hunter-Gault knew she wanted to attend a college with a strong journalism program.
In Georgia, this meant the University of Georgia, which at the time did not admit African Americans. Recognizing her talent and
wanting to challenge segregation in Georgia’s colleges and universities, a group of Atlanta’s black civic leaders approached HunterGault during her senior year of high school. She and her classmate Hamilton Holmes, their high school’s valedictorian, decided to
apply to the University of Georgia but were initially denied admission, despite multiple application attempts. In 1961, after two years
of legal battles, a U.S. District Court judge issued a ruling stating that Hunter-Gault and Holmes were qualified for and entitled to immediate enrollment at the University of Georgia. They became the first African American students in the school’s history.
After graduation from the University of Georgia, Hunter-Gault began her journalism career in New York City, where she worked for
The New Yorker magazine, advancing to the position of staff writer. She left the magazine to accept a one-year Russell Sage Fellowship
and then worked as a reporter and evening anchor for WRC-TV in Washington, D.C., for another year. In 1968 she joined The New
York Times as a staff reporter, eventually becoming the newspaper’s Harlem bureau chief.
Hunter-Gault gained national recognition after she joined the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) news program MacNeil/Lehrer Report in 1978. When the program grew into the 60-minute MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour in 1983, she became its national correspondent
and reported on topics that included racism, Vietnam veterans, life under apartheid, drug abuse, and human rights issues. In 1997
Hunter-Gault left PBS to become the Africa bureau chief for National Public Radio (NPR), and in 1999 she was named Johannesburg
bureau chief for CNN, a post she held until 2005.
Her numerous honors include two Emmy awards and two Peabody awards—one for her work on Apartheid’s People, a NewsHour
series about South African life during apartheid, and the other for general coverage of Africa in 1998. Hunter-Gault also was the
recipient of the 1986 Journalist of the Year Award from the National Association of Black Journalists, the 1990 Sidney Hillman Award,
the American Women in Radio and Television Award, the Good Housekeeping Broadcast Personality of the Year Award, and a 2004
National Association of Black Journalists Award for her CNN series on Zimbabwe. She has also received awards from Amnesty International for her human rights reporting, especially her PBS Series Rights and Wrongs, a human rights television magazine. In 2001 the
Academic Building where Hunter-Gault and fellow student Holmes first registered for classes at the University of Georgia was named
the Holmes-Hunter Academic Building to mark the fortieth anniversary of the school’s desegregation. In August 2005, she was inducted into the National Association of Black Journalists Hall of Fame. Charlayne Hunter-Gault holds more than two dozen honorary
degrees, is on the board of The Committee to Protect Journalists, and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.