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Alison Stewart: You are listening to All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. If you knew Charlayne Hunter when she was just 18, she'd already established herself as an icon when she desegregated the University of Georgia by becoming the university's first Black female student, after she won a Supreme Court case alongside another Black student, Hamilton Holmes. While at UGA, she faced racial abuse shunning from professors and even experienced a mob attacking a dorm room during her first semester.

Fast forward 50 years and Charlayne Hunter-Gault is now one of the most celebrated journalists in the country, particularly for the story she tells about Black people and Black communities. Hunter-Gault established the Harlem Bureau for the New York Times. She's written for The New Yorker and reported for PBS and NPR. She also interviewed Nelson Mandela several times as she covered the end of apartheid in South Africa. Her years of work, reflection, and wisdom are now compiled in her book, My People: Five Decades of Writing About Black Lives, which came out last fall.

The book features a selection of her reporting throughout her career. Charlayne Hunter-Gault joined me around the book's release and I began by asking her what she saw in herself as a young journalist, as she was putting together this collection.

Charlayne Hunter-Gault: I don't think I see anything different from what I see today, because I've always wanted to tell good stories. My first role model was Brenda Starr, who traveled all over the world. I was too young to be involved with the one-eyed mystery man like she was. But I don't really think that my attitude about my profession, and my responsibility to it has really changed. I've always had very good editors and I did, in fact, work for NPR for a year in South Africa. Having had good editors, I think that that has helped me stay on the right path and the same path. I don't really think much has changed.

Alison Stewart: How did you develop your sense about what a journalist should be?

Charlayne Hunter-Gault: Well, I had good role models. When I was in high school at the all Black but really progressive Henry McNeal Turner high school name for historic figure, I worked for the student newspaper and my editor and advisor, and dear friend later in years, when I was old enough to be a friend and not a student, was a wonderful woman who herself had not been able to study journalism in Georgia because of segregation and she's, of course, Black. She went out of the country, and I mean, out of the state, and then came back with a journalism degree and actually couldn't find any place to work.

She came to Henry McNeal Turner high school and help start the green light. She was my first role model. Then, during the Civil Rights Movement, when Julian Bond and so many other young people, John Lewis had been there too, when they were protesting, I was at the University of Georgia, and I would come home on the weekends to help Julian Bond and M. Carl Holman, a professor at Clark College. They had started a newspaper specifically to cover the students because we had an all-Black newspaper, but it was somewhat beholden to its white advertisers so it limited its coverage of the student movement.

On the weekends, I would go to M. Carl Holman's basement where Julian was the managing editor and I would listen to the students who had picketed all day downtown trying to end separate and well, my husband said the other day, you should say separate but equal, but it was separate and unequal, but they will tell me their stories, and I would write them up in the basement. Then there came a time when I said, "I need to get out of this basement and into the streets." That's when I began to go and cover the students and what they were up to.

Eventually, I got up enough nerve to call the president of the school board and I asked her for an interview and lo and behold, she agreed. That was all the inspiration I needed that if you show up and you say, "I'm a journalist," and you present yourself in a proper way, almost anybody will talk to you. I still think that's the case. When I went to South Africa, I was primarily concerned emotionally with those who were victims of apartheid as we had been victims of segregation. I also wanted to talk to the other side, the people who were continuing the discrimination against Black people during apartheid so I went and talked to them too.

I think that's the job of us to present to the world stories of people of all kinds, regardless of their positions. As a journalist with some history, you can also put a lot of that into context, which I've tried to do in my book.

Alison Stewart: The name of the book is My People: Five Decades of Writing About Black Lives. It is by Charlayne Hunter-Gault, who is my guest. On January 9th 2021, a piece of yours in The Times since we're talking about history, the title was, I Desegregated the University of Georgia: History Is Still in the Making. Obviously, the piece was published shortly after the January 6th insurrection at the Capitol. As you were working on this piece, what did you see as the connection between your role in history, I know you weren't trying to make history, you were just trying to pursue a dream and your education, but you wound up making history and the history we were watching and happening that was happening that week?

Charlayne Hunter-Gault: Well, these are two very different situations. The young people who protested against my entry into the University of Georgia, supported, of course, by the segregationist, and I think when they rioted outside of my dormitory the second or third night I was there, many of the adults were there. The Capitol situation is a bit different and what is so surprising is that while we still have a long way to go, we've made a lot of progress. We have good laws on the books, and we have good people trying to implement those laws.

They were being challenged by this, I guess you could say, a little bit in the same way, but I don't think we've ever had in my lifetime anything like what happened at the Capitol on January 6th. Although I'm not in the street anymore as a journalist, sometimes I just wish I had been there and could have written about it the way I wrote about Resurrection City and the way I wrote about other things in total context.

There's no context for January 6th, it's against the law, and I'm very eager to see how this all turns out. I don't have any journalistic investment in it, other than in my head and I'm not writing about it, but as a citizen, I'm watching and hoping that we will do what is necessary to continue towards a more perfect union, because that was not at all consistent with our path towards a more perfect union. Now, what happens with those who did that may or may not be consistent with our effort set a more perfect union, but I hope it will.

Alison Stewart: You have mentioned this, as is such an interesting idea and I'll take off my journalist hat, I completely agree with you on this idea that you said, ''I never liked the term objective for we are all creatures of our environments, and background.''

Charlayne Hunter-Gault: Right, my computer is objective, well, sometimes because sometimes it doesn't work and I don't know what that means if it's talking to me saying, "Don't do that.'' We are not objective, but my preference is the phrase fair and balanced. I learned from my own role models like Jim Lehrer who said at one time, "Give people good information, and they will do the right thing." Or something to that effect. There was another journalist Edward R. Murrow who said, "This instrument can teach, it can illuminate, it can inspire, but it can only do so to the extent that people use it, don't think of it as lights and wires in a box."

I think that's prescient statements from them. It's still the case. What troubles me, you didn't ask me this, but what troubles me is how local newspapers, including in Black communities, are disappearing because, once again, there aren't the funds and I know the money is out there. I'm begging people every day to help these local newspapers survive and to help organizations like NPR because it has paved the way for such good journalism and looking at people in their totality. Yes. I'm hoping that Jim Lehrer's advice and Edward R Murrow's and M. Carl Holman and all of those will fall to some of you. I can see that it has fallen to you and people at NPR and other places. I'm just hoping that our I'm hoping that our commitment remains intact.

Alison Stewart: Yes, this whole idea of objectivity, it's so interesting because I think it leads back to the idea of the lack of diversity in newsrooms because the default objectivity back in the day was the three guys in the evening news, the three white men in the evening news. Whereas people say, describe somebody being subjective when they just have life experience. They were able to bring that life experience and to illuminate and to create depth in the reporting.

If somebody's parents are married 50 years and they're reporting on divorce, maybe they don't know so much as the kid who had to live through it who's now a young adult and a reporter. That reporter brings something to that story. It doesn't mean they're not objective, it just means they have different information and life experience.

Charlayne Hunter-Gault: That's true. That's true. The thing is, as I watch all of the news, most of the time there are efforts being made to bring more people with different perspectives, including people of different colors and ages and so forth onto the newsroom. If you watch, which I do every Sunday, particularly the news analyses programs, you can see the difference in perspectives that different colors of people and sexes bring to it. I think that we're on the right track.

I just think that the decision makers also have to be more diverse in order to ensure that those they've brought on to the stations are inspired by them, protected by them. I guess inspired and encouraged is the same thing, but yes, that we are making some progress, and yet our history needs to be a part of the consciousness of those who are now making progress and doing the news.

Alison Stewart: There's a small anecdote, and please correct me if I don't get this exactly right, which I found really interesting as a parent as well, is that you were set to cover Nelson Mandela, and I believe it was your child's graduation. Mandela says, "No, you go to that, and you go to that. We will speak another time." You did, you chose to go to your family and be there for your family. I know a lot of people might not have made that choice. I'm curious, in that moment, what made you make that choice?

Charlayne Hunter-Gault: Well, it was my son Chuma who is an actor now and who was graduating from Emory University. I don't know, I think that my family has always been so supportive of me and my work. I had to be away from them many times when I was traveling around the world away from them when they were in elementary school and high school and went to college and about to graduate. I think that in the end, while I have multiple identities as a Black person, as a woman, as a preacher's kid, a PK, they all say and as a journalist, you have to keep those not necessarily separate, but in some order.

Our children didn't ask to be brought into this world. I think that it is our obligation. I hear you say you are a mom. I want to know how old your children or child are, but we have an obligation to them. I think that Mandela at the time appreciated what I was needing to do because of something he had been unable to do physically. In his head, he was still a parent and he hadn't had much opportunity to be a parent given the role that he played in the anti-apartheid struggle. I think in his brilliant head he still understood the role of a parent and blessed me that day in such a wonderful way that I was almost in tears.

Of course, he stayed with his promise of being available to me whenever I needed to interview him. It paid off for both for my son and for Mandela and for me.

Alison Stewart: The name of the book is My People: Five Decades of Writing About Black Lives. I have to say this while I can, I'm able to have my job and do my job because of you, Charlayne Hunter-Gault, so I just wanted to say thank you and also thank you for being on my show.

Charlayne Hunter-Gault: Well, thank you. It's been a real pleasure. I'm no longer homesick because you made me feel at kome

Alison Stewart: That was Charlayne Hunter-Gault on her career in journalism, some of which is compiled in her new book, My People: Five Decades of Writing About Black Lives.

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Alison Stewart: Finally, to end the show, we say goodbye to another journalistic milestone, the end of MTV News.

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