Charlayne Hunter-Gault

Charlayne Hunter-Gault (born 27 February 1942) is an American journalist and former foreign correspondent for National Public Radio, and the Public Broadcasting Service.

In 1961, Athens, Georgia witnessed part of the civil rights movement when Charlayne Hunter and Hamilton Holmes became the first two African-American students to enroll in the University of Georgia. She graduated in 1963.

In 1967, she joined the investigative news team at WRC-TV, Washington, D.C., and also anchored the local evening news. In 1968, Charlayne joined The New York Times as a metropolitan reporter specializing in coverage of the urban African-American community. She joined The MacNeil/Lehrer Report in 1978 as a correspondent, and became 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 from 1997 to 1999. Hunter-Gault recently left her post as CNN's Johannesburg bureau chief and correspondent, which she had held since 1999.

During her association with The NewsHour, Hunter-Gault has won additional awards: two Emmys, and a Peabody for excellence in broadcast journalism for her work on Apartheid's People, a NewsHour series on South Africa. She also received the 1986 Journalist of the Year Award from the National Association of Black Journalists; the 1990 Sidney Hillman Award; the Good Housekeeping Broadcast Personality of the Year Award; the American Women in Radio and Television Award; and two awards from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting for excellence in local programming.

Hunter-Gault is author of In My Place (1992), a memoir about her experiences at the University of Georgia. She currently lives in Massachusetts and is working on a first-person memoir detailing the struggle of African Americans in the 1960s.