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Date: 10/25/2022
SOUTH HADLEY – Legendary award-winning journalist Charlayne Hunter-Gault spoke with Reminder Publishing about her life and career work as she prepares to visit Mount Holyoke College on Oct. 27 to present her new book, “My People: Five Decades of Writing About Black Lives.”
The Odyssey Bookshop in South Hadley is joining with Mount Holyoke College and New England Public Media to host Hunter-Gault as she presents her new book, a collection of ground-breaking reporting from her career as a journalist that spans over five decades and chronicles the experience of Black life in America. She will be joined in conversation by Dr. Beverly Daniel Tatum, interim president of Mount Holyoke College.
The event will be hosted on the campus of Mount Holyoke College in Hooker Auditorium at 7 p.m. and doors open at 6:30 p.m.
Hunter-Gault said her passion for writing and becoming a reporter came from her grandmother and mother encouraging her from a young age that she could be anything she wanted to be. She noted her grandmother was well educated and felt it was important to go beyond what segregationists were suggesting or requiring of Black people, and that lesson was brought down to Hunter-Gault.
“She read three newspapers a day and she would always give me the comics because I love reading and I fell in love with a comic strip character, Brenda Star. I told my mother at a certain point, ‘you know, when I grow up, I want to be Brenda Star,” Hunter-Gault said. “She didn’t say, ‘Oh, no little Black girls like you can’t do what little white girls like her [Star] do or did.’ She said very casually and nonchalantly, ‘If that’s what you want to do.’ And I think that was what so inspired me.”
At the time Hunter-Gault said she was too young to fully analyze the confidence her mother and grandmother were instilling in her during the times of “separate but equal” but that it was put in her head that if she wanted to do something, she could do it.
Soon through school Hunter-Gault began learning about real life journalists and writers, specifically black journalists like Ida B. Wells. Wells was a journalist during the civil rights movement and later became an activist and one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
When it came time to go to college and further her education, Hunter-Gault ended up finding herself in the midst of a historic legal challenge that culminated in her admission to the University of Georgia in January 1961, making her one of the first two Black students to integrate the institution. She called the successful challenge of segregation, “a major step in our quest for a more perfect union,” a phrase she still believes in and uses to this day.
Hamilton Holmes was the other student, along with Hunter-Gault, to begin desegregation of the university. They chose to apply to the University of Georgia , and as students with very high academic grades and filled resumes, they knew if they were denied it was on the premise of their race.
When first arriving on campus the two were met with protesters and were not welcomed fully on campus. The two each had their own dorm room set up but still segregated them to the first floor of a dorm building and away from white students. While living on campus is when Hunter-Gault said she learned her experience, and the experience in whole as a Black American, was not the first instance of people fighting for rights regardless of race, creed, color or national origin.
“In the end, we’re all people and we have a lot to learn from each other,” Hunter-Gault said.
One example of Hunter-Gault learning this lesson was one night when a group of white female students knocked on her door with groceries and an offer to cook dinner for her.
“I didn’t prejudge them and think they were there to help or hurt me and so they came in and started cooking and we started talking,” Hunter-Gault said. “The most important thing I think about that night, in addition to having a nice dinner, was that they told me they understood what I was going through because their parents and grandparents had gone through something similar, and it turns out they were talking about the Holocaust.”
Learning from the girls about their Jewish heritage and the history of their families resonated with Hunter-Gault and showed her an example of humans being more similar than they are different.
“I grew up in Georgia, where I knew Black, and I knew white. I did not know Jewish and so I learned something that was very, very important,” said Hunter-Gault.
Hunter-Gault has still maintained her friendship with the women who visited her that night. She added it is amazing when history is learned and appreciated in order to keep teaching history no matter what the opposition to it is.
She eventually graduated from the university and began a career in journalism. Hunter-Gault found herself throughout her career in some of the most respected journalistic institutions in the country like the New York Times and the New Yorker, where she was often the only Black woman in the newsroom.
Hunter-Gault found news organizations that were willing to hire Black people in the newsroom and was getting interviews as a prospective employee yet sometimes higher-ups’ understanding of “open-mindedness” was a little bit limited when it came to Black people.
“So, I said, ‘look, I’m always going to search for the truth, but I’m not going to be presumptuous when I go to cover somebody that’s been accused of something because more often than not Black people were often accused of things they didn’t do, and even punished for it,” Hunter-Gault said.
That conversation occurred while Hunter-Gault was at the New York Times, and she said her bosses respected her perspective and gave her opportunities. She found herself reporting often out of Harlem, historically one of the largest Black communities in the country.
This led to Hunter-Gault being the lead reporter for the new Harlem Bureau for the Times, the first of its kind.
“After I had worked at the Times for a little while, having spent a good bit of time in Harlem, I suggested to the same editor that we open a bureau so that I could live among the people I was reporting on and surely get different perspectives on them and what they were doing and eventually he agreed,” Hunter-Gault said.
Hunter-Gault said the change made a huge difference in her reporting as she was able to be there every day and gain new perspectives of the community being reported on.
“You see the good, the bad, the ugly. I never want to say that we are perfect. Just like I don’t say we have a perfect union,” Hunter-Gault said. “So, you know, I didn’t go there just to do positive stories. I went there to do stories about people who have a variety of identities and issues and stuff like that. I wanted to write about people in their entirety. The New Yorker allowed me to do that, the New York Times allowed me to do that.”
Hunter-Gault has found a successful and rewarding career as a journalist and has been honored with two Emmys and a Peabody Award for excellence in journalism, among many other accolades. She eventually joined the PBS Newshour as its first substitute anchor and national correspondent and has written four previous books before he latest work.
Throughout her career, Hunter-Gault has chronicled the lives of Black people living in America and shined a light on their experiences, giving a glimpse into their community more than ever before. Though she has covered numerous topics and events, observed as a whole, her work reveals the evolving issues at the forefront of Black Americans lives and how many of the same issues continue to persist today.
“My People” showcases Hunter-Gault’s lifelong commitment to reporting on black people in their totality and “in ways that are recognizable to themselves.” Spanning from the Civil Rights Movement through the election and inauguration of the United States’ first Black President and beyond, this collection shows the nuances of the black experience through trials, tragedies and triumphs in everyday lives.
Hunter-Gault hopes readers of her book take away that while things have changed over time, some things have not changed enough.
“There’s still reporting going on that’s basically negative on black people and I’m not going to call out any particular channels on television,” Hunter-Gault said. “So, we still very much need to give history because history is a prelude to the future.”
Communication between one another is key in resolving many repeating issues within America and race according to Hunter-Gault, which is why she is traveling promoting her latest work and will be visiting Mount Holyoke College. She added she hopes her book is “good information” that helps readers appreciate the history of Black America and learning what more is still needed to be done.
“We had our history, and our history continues to be out armor,” Hunter-Gault said. “So, it’s very important for us to help keep alive our local community newspapers,” Hunter-Gault said. “I think that we journalists have a role to play each and every day in whatever media medium we work.”