Undeterred

The photo shows Charlayne Hunter leaving the University of Georgia campus after registering as a student.

She holds a place in Georgia civil rights history as one of the first two African American students (the other student was Hamilton Holmes) admitted to the University of Georgia. Also known for her career as an award-winning journalist, Hunter-Gault is respected for her work on television and in print.

Hunter and Holmes arrived on the University of Georgia in Athens, (UGA) campus on January 9, 1961, to register for classes. The new students were met with taunts and racial epithets. Two days later, after a basketball game, a crowd gathered outside Hunter's dormitory, smashing windows with bottles and bricks. The mob was finally dispersed by Athens police armed with tear gas. That night the Georgia State Patrol escorted the students back to their homes in Atlanta, and the University of Georgia suspended both Hunter and Holmes, supposedly for their own safety.

Days later, after a new court order was issued, the students returned to campus and resumed their classes. As the writer Calvin Trillin noted in his account of their experience, Hunter "attracted much more attention than Hamilton," who lived off campus and went home on weekends. Hunter was sometimes met with animosity from students who jeered at her while she crossed campus, but she formed several friendships, including one with Walter Stovall, a fellow journalism student. They married in 1961, had a daughter, and divorced a few years later.

Hunter graduated from UGA in 1963 and accepted her first job as an editorial assistant at the New Yorker magazine in New York City. After advancing to the position of staff writer, she left the magazine to accept a Russell Sage Fellowship for one year, then worked as a reporter and evening anchor for WRC-TV in Washington, D.C., for another year. Hunter returned to print journalism in 1968, joining the metropolitan staff of the New York Times and establishing 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 in 1978 to join PBS's MacNeil/Lehrer Report, becoming national correspondent and filling in as anchor when the program expanded to become The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour (later The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer). Hunter-Gault left public television in 1997 to join her husband, who had been transferred to South Africa; she became the chief correspondent in Africa for National Public Radio (NPR). She departed NPR in 1999 to join CNN and currently serves as the network's Johannesburg, South Africa, bureau chief.

As a journalist Hunter-Gault has received numerous awards, including two National News and Documentary Emmy Awards as well as two Peabody Awards.

In 1992 Hunter-Gault published a memoir 'In My Place' of her childhood and her years at UGA, and together with Holmes, established an academic scholarship for African American students. In 2001 the Academic Building where Hunter-Gault and Holmes first registered for classes at UGA was named the Holmes-Hunter Academic Building to mark the fortieth anniversary of the school's desegregation.

Life Magazine
Joseph Scherschel, Photographer