Charlayne Hunter-Gault
My People: Five Decades of Writing About Black Lives 
New York: HarperCollins, 2022, xiii + 343 pages
by Jo Freeman
Charlayne Hunter-Gault made the national news when she was one of two Black students who integrated the University of Georgia in 1961. She’s been writing national news ever since. After graduation in 1963 she was invited to join the staff of The New Yorker where she stayed for many years. She went on to be a correspondent for The New York Times, PBS, National Public Radio, and CNN.
This book gives you several dozen samples from her career as a journalist, but it’s not about that career. There’s a little biographical information in the Forward (by someone else) and scattered pieces in introductions to the rest of the book. You learn that she wanted to be a journalist from a very early age, and that she spent many years in South Africa. Journalism came easy.
While still a student she worked on the Atlanta Inquirer, a Black weekly started by the Atlanta Student Movement in 1960 because the city’s only black newspaper wouldn’t write about the civil rights movement or young people protesting segregation.
Nine republished pieces are about Africa and another nine are about different aspects of her personal life in the US – a stay in Harlem when she was five, returning to U.Ga nine years after she integrated it, vacationing in Martha’s Vineyard. Eleven are on women. She interviewed the famous (e.g. Nelson Mandela), the infamous (e.g. the Black Panthers) and the not famous (her grandmother). Sometimes she writes about what she is thinking, and sometimes it’s “just the facts” of conventional journalism.
Her perspective is captured by the title. My People means Black Africans, and American descendants of Black Africans, whether they be in New York, Atlanta, Ethiopia or South Africa. Whites float in and out of her world, but with a couple notable exceptions, they aren’t in it.
C H-G is a superb writer, with a talent for capturing the flavor of a scene. She tries to get inside her subjects’ heads, to see the world as they see it. The book would be good for more than a casual read if it had an index, but it’s still a good read.
As we contemplate today’s news, it’s good to remind ourselves how things used to be.
Copyright © 2022 Jo Freeman
Jo has finished her book Tell It Like It Is: Living History in the Southern Civil Rights Movement, 1965-66 and is looking for a publisher.
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