Hunter-Gault for Commencement

 



Charlayne Hunter-Gault, award-winning journalist and Johannesburg bureau chief for the Cable News Network (CNN), will deliver Duke’s 2001 commencement address Sunday, May 13.
Hunter-Gault joined CNN in April 1999, after two years as National Public Radio’s chief correspondent in Africa. Before joining NPR in 1997, she worked for twenty years with PBS, where she was a national correspondent for The MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour, now The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. During that time, she also anchored the award-winning “Rights and Wrongs,” a television news maga-zine on human rights. Her honors include two Emmy awards and two Peabody awards (one for her work on “Apartheid’s People,” a NewsHour series on life during apartheid in South Africa; the second for general reporting on Africa in 1998).
In January 1961, following two years of efforts by the state of Georgia to deny them admittance, Hunter-Gault and Hamilton Holmes became the first two African Americans to attend the University of Georgia. Last January, the University of Georgia held ceremonies commemorating the fortieth anniversary of the university’s desegregation and named a building after Hunter-Gault and Holmes.
Hunter-Gault began her journalism career as a reporter for The New Yorker. She then worked as a local news anchor for WRC-TV in Washington, D.C., before joining The New York Times for ten years, including two years as the newspaper’s Harlem bureau chief. While in New York in the 1970s, she also directed a minority journalism program at Columbia University.
Her other honors include the 1986 Journalist of the Year Award from the National Association of Black Journalists, the Good Housekeeping Broadcast Personality of the Year Award, and Amnesty International’s Media Spotlight Award. In 2000, she received from The Africa-America Institute the first Chairman’s Award for Excellence in Media for her balanced reporting on Africa.
Hunter-Gault is the author of In My Place, a memoir of her experiences at the University of Georgia. She holds more than two dozen honorary degrees.

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