Charlayne Hunter-Gault AT THE Peabody Awards. May 2015. Wikimedia Commons.
(1942 - ) Charlayne Hunter was born in Due West, South Carolina, the oldest child of Althea Ruth Brown and Charles S. H. Hunter Jr. Hunter-Gault applied for admission to the segregated University of Georgia. Initially denied admittance, a group of Atlanta lawyers won her admittance to the University of Georgia and became one of the first African American students in the school’s history, graduating with a degree in journalism.
Her first job was an editorial assistant at the New Yorker magazine in New York City. She soon accepted a Russell Sage Fellowship for one year, then worked as a reporter and evening anchor for in Washington, D.C., for another year. Hunter joinied the New York Times and established the newspaper’s Harlem bureau. While working at the paper, Hunter married Ronald Gault, a banker, and had a son.
Hunter-Gault left the New York Times to join PBS’s MacNeil/Lehrer Report, becoming national correspondent. Hunter-Gault left public television to join her husband in South Africa;and became the chief correspondent in Africa for National Public Radio (NPR). She departed NPR to join CNN where she served as the network’s bureau chief and correspondent in Johannesburg, South Africa.
