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Forty-nine years ago, a young woman named Charlayne Hunter graduated third in her class from Henry McNeal Turner High School, in those days the most prestigious high school for African-Americans in Atlanta. Charlayne wanted to be a journalist. The University of Georgia had the strongest journalism program in the state, but the university did not accept blacks. Segregation was not something that teen-agers thought to battle in 1959, so Charlayne started making other plans, applying to schools in the Midwest. Yet something was happening in the South: sparked by incidents like Rosa Parks’s historic refusal in Montgomery and the rise of young preachers like Martin Luther King in Atlanta, a movement was developing. And so, at the urging of some black leaders in town, Charlayne and Turner High School’s valedictorian, Hamilton Holmes, challenged segregation at the University of Georgia by sending in applications for admission. Their applications were soon rejected. Then a legal team led by the N.A.A.C.P.’s Constance Baker Motley, and including such young lawyers as Vernon Jordan, championed their case, and, two years later, a U.S. District Court judge ruled that Charlayne Hunter and Hamilton Holmes were indeed qualified for admission to the University of Georgia and must be allowed to matriculate without delay. They started school in Athens in the winter of 1961. For months, they heard racist taunts as they walked to class. Charlayne had bricks hurled through her windows. But she and Holmes stayed on and they studied and made many friends, and their case became yet another landmark of the civil-rights movement, along with the marches in Selma and Montgomery—and the church bombings and the beatings, and the murders of Medgar Evers and Martin Luther King still to come.
Over the past four decades, Charlayne Hunter-Gault, as she has been known for many years, has worked at this magazine, at the Times, for PBS, and for NPR, for which she is now a reporter living in Johannesburg. She is sixty-six. When it was becoming clear a few weeks ago that Barack Obama was on his way to winning the Presidency, we had a series of exchanges about the election. Hunter-Gault was especially impressed by the young Senator’s calm when the political and personal attacks came; she said that it reminded her of what her own family, and the families of so many activists in the civil-rights movement, had instilled in their children as a code of behavior. “Try as I can, I am unable to separate my civil-rights past from my present as a journalist because both of my lives converge at this moment,” she wrote in one note, “because without the movement I wouldn’t be where I am today, and neither would Barack Obama. But because of the movement I was not one of those who thought, Not in my lifetime, not least because I had seen and felt the power of young people, with only their convictions as weapons, tear down the walls of the decades-long system of segregation. And for the first time since the movement I saw a new generation of young people fighting in the same way for change that would bring back the idealism that fuelled our struggles in the streets.”
-- David Remnick, “The Joshua Generation,” The New
Yorker, November 17, 2008
Deana Williams and Kerra Quarles, Miami 2008
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