Meriggi 1 Macey Meriggi December 8, 2012 History of Journalism Final Research Paper

Pioneer of Pioneers

Although much of the focus of Charlayne Hunter-Gaults life and career is centered on her role in the desegregation of the University of Georgia in the early 60s and her establishment of the Harlem bureau of The New York Times, I want to take a closer look at her broadcast coverage of the apartheid system of government in South Africa. Her 1985 PBS MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour series Apartheids People investigated the day-to-day lives of people who were bound up by the apartheid system in South Africa. Apartheids People was an in-depth series that focused on the situation as a whole, rather than capitalizing solely on the misery and depravity of the black people who suffered as a result of the oppressive government unlike much of the coverage at the time. This paper is based on several primary materials including two of her books New News Out of Africa and In My Place, the PBS NewsHour series Apartheids People, and two interviews with Charlayne Hunter-Gault, one conducted by former SMU student Khadija Farah and the other conducted by Macey Meriggi. The study will examine questions covering these areas: First, What experiences influenced Hunter-Gaults decision to become a journalist? Second, What prompted Hunter-Gaults interest in reporting on the black communities in New York? Third, How was a pioneer of civil rights in America

Meriggi 2 able to deliver a fair and balanced account of the atrocities set forth by the South African apartheid system? My study arrived at three main conclusions. One, the study found that Hunter-Gaults maternal grandmother initially sparked her interest in journalism. Two, my study found that Hunter-Gaults experiences at UGA taught her how to recognize good reporting and she saw the need for writers to cover stories of African-Americans. Three, it found that due to her experiences as a civil rights activists she was able to recognize what the issues were and how to shed light on the situation in South Africa. Charlayne Hunter-Gault was born in the small town of Due West, South Carolina on February 27, 1942 to Col. Charles S. H. Hunter and Althea Brown. Her father Charles Hunter was a regimental chaplain of the U.S. Army and was transferred many times due to his occupation. Although the Hunter family frequently relocated, Charlayne spent most of her childhood in Covington and Atlanta where she and her two brothers, Henry and Franklyn, were primarily raised by her mother and her maternal grandmother. HunterGaults grandmother, who was taken out of school in the third grade to help her own mother survive, was a great inspiration to the young girl. Hunter-Gault recalls how her grandmother never stopped trying to educate herself and that she read three newspapers every day. One of those papers had a comic strip called Brenda Starr who was a reporter that travelled the world with exciting assignments for a fictional newspaper. Brenda Starrs stories became an inspiration for Hunter-Gault, The combination of this woman who travelled the world and had all these wonderful things going on in her life was so exciting to me that I just internalized Brenda Starrs life. From that point on I said Oh, I want to be a journalist.1

Farah Interview with Hunter-Gault

Meriggi 3 During her time at Turner High School in Atlanta, Hunter-Gault began her foray into the world of journalism with the student newspaper, The Green Light.2 By her senior year at Turner she had served as editor of the paper for two years and when it came time to apply for college, Hunter-Gault began looking at schools with strong journalism programs. She eventually decided on Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan but in 1959 she and her classmate Hamilton Holmes were approached by a group called the Atlanta Committee for Cooperative Action (ACCA) who were looking for talented students to challenge segregation in the Georgia school systems. Hunter-Gault and Hamilton were denied admission to University of Georgia Athens so Hunter-Gault began her studies at WSU in Detroit. After a two year long legal battle with the state of Georgia, the students were finally allowed to enroll in classes at UGA in January of 1961, making them the first two African-American students to be admitted to the school. Of course they were met with unwelcoming crowds when they first arrived on campus and were forced to endure taunts and racial epithets but, for fear of being expelled, Hunter-Gault did not participate in sit-ins or picket lines like many of her friends were doing in downtown Atlanta. I was already in a position where freedom and justice, and equality was important to me. Not because of my case but because throughout the South at that time, students my age were doing some pretty dangerous things to bring about justice and equality for black people in the South. The seeds of my early journalistic career were sown partly, during this period, when I watched the journalists who covered me to see how they were doing it and it was very easy to separate the good ones from the bad. There were some who could write a good story that would be positively

Hunter-Gault, Charlayne. In My Place. 109.

Meriggi 4 reflected on the situation although they didnt set out to do it that way but they were just honest in their coverage.3 Those journalists who were towing the segregationists line often wrote or produced negatively spun accounts and occasionally made stuff up. She remembers seeing one journalist who had missed a shot of some students yelling ugly epithets and shaking their fists as Hunter and Holmes walked by because he had arrived late. She watched as he organized a few students to reenact this so he could have it for his show that night. Watching the movement and the way reporters acted, good or bad, helped shape Hunter-Gaults own reporting skills as well as her ethical understanding of the media. Despite the controversy that surrounded her education at UGA due to racial tensions, Hunter-Gault graduated from UGA in 1963 and accepted her first job at the New Yorker magazine and worked her way up to a staff writer position. She said, upon arriving in New York, My first interest was how black people were fairing, whether it was the judicial system or in the cultural arena or education, primarily because there was such a dearth of information and good reporting about black people in those days. There were few African-American reporters. I chose to look at people whose culture I knew and could report with some authority on their lives.4 In 1968, she joined the New York Times staff and shortly thereafter convinced her editor to set up a bureau in Harlem where she worked as a metropolitan reporter covering the African-American community. For Hunter-Gault, her race was not a hindrance when it came to her career because she was able to find her own niche due to her skin color. I sized up the situation and saw that nobody was writing about black people, she said, I
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Farah Interview with Hunter-Gault Farah Interview with Hunter-Gault

Meriggi 5 began writing about events in Harlem, not always the typical Harlem but writing about the characters and some of the history of the street corner preachers like Malcolm X and Marcus Garvey, people who used to stand on 125th street and preach about the conditions of blacks.5 She remembered a black man from the Caribbean who founded a bookstore in Harlem with thousands of books, by and about black people, and how his little store became a meeting place for writers. She wrote about this man who would speak in couplets and would say things like: The white mans dream of being supreme is turned to sour cream. I wrote about real people as opposed to people as victims or peoples pathologies That was the sort of paradigm I followed from that point on even though my work ultimately took me all over the world and way beyond the cultures and histories and conditions of black people, Hunter-Gault said.6 When she interviewed with the editor he asked her if in the case that she was sent to report on a story in Harlem that involved people she knew, would she be able to tell the truth? to which she replied, I guess it would depend. This was nothing new for Hunter-Gault, The truth of the matter is that Ive always lived in communities where people make news and in particular when I was in New York I lived in Harlem and then I lived near Columbia University and I had a lot of friends that were involved in politics and community development and stuff like that. They all knew that our friendship was on one level and my professionalism, my journalism, was on another. So if it came to my having to write about them in a way that wasnt flattering no doubt because they had done something that generally deserved that kind of coverage, Id have to cover it.7

Farah Interview with Hunter-Gault Farah Interview with Hunter-Gault 7 Meriggi Interview with Charlayne Hunter-Gault
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Meriggi 6 During her time at the New York Times Hunter-Gault witnessed a widespread change within the African-American community: they didnt want to be called negroes anymore. During our phone call she told me about an incident where she had travelled to Chicago to cover a story and when she dictated her story to a white copy editor in New York she used the term black throughout the article. When she returned to New York the story had been printed and the editor had changed black to negro, she chuckled and admitted that she had a fit. She wrote an eleven page office memo about the obnoxiousness of white editors who knew nothing of the communities they were writing about, How could a white suburban editor decide if you were going to use the term black if the majority of black people were saying that was the term they wanted to use? she asked. This, she said, got her in a little trouble with her editor but it did result in a change she had hoped for, at least within the newsroom.8 Hunter-Gault left the New York Times in 1978 to join PBSs The MacNeil/Leher Report (later NewsHour) as a national correspondent and filling in as anchor when the program expanded in 1983. In 1985, Hunter-Gault travelled to Africa on assignment for NewsHour which I will cover in greater detail in the next section. Her husband Ronald T. Gault, a banker, was transferred to South Africa and in 1997 she joined him and became the chief correspondent for NPR. She left NPR and joined CNN in 1999 where she served as bureau chief and correspondent in Johannesburg until 2005. In addition to her print and broadcast journalistic works she has published three books and has won many awards including two Emmys and two Peabodys.

Meriggi/Farah Interviews with Hunter-Gault

Meriggi 7 Hunter-Gault told me that she has always enjoyed new challenges, which led to her decision in 1978 to leave the New York Times and join the MacNeil/Leher Report, going to the best news program on television represented a challenge for me and also an opportunity to continue the kind of journalism that I like to think I was doing at the New York Times for a different audience.9 When I asked her if the switch from print journalism to television intimidated her she explained to me that she doesnt like to differentiate between the two, I see journalism as journalism.10 She went on to say, I feel that regardless of the medium you chose to practice journalism in, to be successful at it, not only in terms of ratings but successful in communicating with the public, you have to be able to give the public what we in the news area call news that can be used. Its not about you, its about the kind of information you get and present to the people.11 In 1985, Hunter-Gault volunteered to take a team to South Africa to cover the struggle of the black South Africans against the apartheid system of government that had been in power since 1948. She did not know anyone in South Africa at the time but felt that the story hit close to home with her because of her involvement in the civil rights movement in the United States. She felt confident that given how NewsHour was able to cover stories in greater depth, she could get to the people as opposed to the images. It seemed to me that it [NewsHour] was the one place that could get beyond the daily coverage or the occasional coverage that was happening, that was appearing or airing in other media. The coverage was mostly focusing on apartheid and the oppressive whites, apartheid rulers, and the oppressed black majority. I wanted to get a deeper understanding

Meriggi Interview with Hunter-Gault Meriggi Interview with Hunter-Gault 11 Meriggi Interview with Hunter-Gault
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Meriggi 8 of what motivated white people, Afrikaners, to think of black people as slightly less than human.12 Her experience as a civil rights pioneer parlayed almost seamlessly into an advantage over media coverage from that time. She believes that her personal experience with the civil rights movement did not influence her coverage of apartheid but it did inform her coverage because she was familiar with what the issues were, South Africa and apartheid was like Jim Crow [laws] and so it made it a lot easier when I needed to be able to ask the questions that I needed to ask. The white Afrikaner people believed that their superiority was ordained in the bible and thats not much different from southern whites.13 At that time, the apartheid regime had declared a state of emergency, which broadened its powers to restrict any and all movement, especially in the poor, black townships outside of the cities. Soon after the team arrived in South Africa they made an illegal trip to Kwa-Thema, a township on the outskirts of Johannesburg, with the help of a sympathetic nun named Sister Agatha.14 Sister Agatha introduced the team to a woman running an unlicensed bar that they would refer to as Teresa. Teresa had been beaten by black police agents and taken into the police station, never explaining why they had done so. In her book New News Out of Africa, Hunter-Gault details this encounter with Teresa, As she told us her story, she showed us her scarsher huge breasts blue and green from the bruises sustained during the beating, her head caked with blood from the many blows, her back bearing the scars of the sjambok, the long black runner whip favored by police in their confrontations with activists.15 Even though she had bore witness to the brutality of the anti-segregationists in America, Hunter-Gault was overwhelmed with emotion and Meriggi Interview with Hunter-Gault Meriggi Interview with Hunter-Gault 14 Hunter-Gault, Charlayne. New News Out of Africa. Page 9. 15 New News. Page 9.
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Meriggi 9 burst into tears at the sight of this innocent woman who had been beaten because the police may have believed she was involved in the anti-apartheid movement. When I spoke with her, she explained to me that she believes that journalists have to have empathy; at times it is difficult to be objective because we are all human, not computers.16 Teresas story (September 30,1985) became a part of the prize-winning series called Apartheids People, which was cited as being the first up-close look at the people who were victimized in South Africa. Unlike most of the coverage to date, Apartheids People went beyond the stereotypical snapshots of black victims and white oppressors, recognizing the humanity in all parties involved.17 The first person the series highlighted was a man named Mtutuzela Matshoba, an executive in the white business world who is confined by law to his all-black township by night. The second, a white man named Janni La Roux, a farmer whose family had settled in South Africa in the 1600s and an ardent supporter of the apartheid system. The third part of the broadcast aired in 1985 profiled the black township of Kwa-Thema where Hunter-Gault met Teresa. The fourth person is the leader of the countrys largest union, the National Union of Mineworkers. Although I was unable to obtain a copy of the original broadcast from 1985, I did find a transcript from one of the segments featuring African National Congress (ANC) leaders as well as South African government officials (included in email). Hunter-Gault does a great job of drawing on diverse sources. Because of her interest in the human side of the situation in South Africa she mainly focuses on individuals but in this excerpt she does draw on official sources, which give the series even more credibility and balance. Hunter-Gault gives the piece historical context by
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Meriggi Interview with Hunter-Gault Meriggi Interview with Hunter-Gault

Meriggi 10 describing the black unrest in South Africa and including sound bytes from ANC information director Thabo Mbeki, ANC President Oliver Tambo, South African President Pieter W. Botha, and an interview with South African Foreign Minister Pik Botha. As I mentioned before, the work Hunter-Gault did in South Africa went much deeper than the typical coverage during the crucial time in South Africas history. Hunter-Gault sums up the series by addressing one of the underlying issues of the struggle, a lack of communication between opposing sides. In her interview with Pik Botha, she probes him about the current position of the government in regards to the antiapartheid movement and Minister Botha becomes increasingly hostile and even cuts Hunter-Gault off. What I find interesting is that Minister Botha claims that the government is making changes in respect to the racial discrimination within the country but in the series, the same year as the interview, we see the country as it had been since World War II and apartheid was not officially banned for another nine years. Judging from the interview with Botha, I think it is fair to say that communication error played a large role in the conflict between the ANC and the South African government. HunterGault proposes deep, meaningful questions while still remaining impartial. Hunter-Gault admits Its a fine line Ive had to cross as an activist in my early life and then as a professional journalist but I have tried to maintain a balance and tried to always be professional in what I do for work.18 After reviewing the life and career of Charlayne Hunter-Gault I found that no matter what your background may be, as a journalist, you have a responsibility to share a fair and balanced account of events with the public. To be a good journalist, Hunter-Gault

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Farah Interview with Hunter-Gault

Meriggi 11 says, You have to have a capacity to get excited about just about anything, everything.19 Before I spoke with Mrs. Hunter-Gault, I was under the impression that in order to be a journalist you would have to be able to separate yourself from the emotions involved in a story. After reflecting on our conversation, I now realize that having empathy and being moved by heart-wrenching stories is only natural and can even help you get to the real issues at hand. However, it is important to gather both sides of an issue even if you may not personally agree with the organizations involved. Mrs. Hunter-Gault was able to report a fair and balanced report of the daily lives of those people affected by the apartheid regime in South Africa. The beauty of being a journalist and author is that she is able to express her opinions in her books that would not be considered objective views if they were to be aired as news. As I said in class, when we first received this assignment I thought that there could only be a limited amount of pioneers within the field but what I realized from my research as well as the research my classmates did is that there will always be room for more firsts within the profession. Finding your niche or being able to recognize a need for a specific type of journalism is just the first step.

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Meriggi Interview with Hunter-Gault

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Bibliography

Apartheids People. MacNeil/Leher NewsHour. PBS. 1985. Television. Hunter-Gault, Charlayne. In My Place. New York: Vintage, 1992. Print. Hunter-Gault, Charlayne. New News Out of Africa: Uncovering Africa's Renaissance. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006. Print. Hunter-Gault, Charlayne. Phone Interview- Macey Meriggi. December 6, 2012. Hunter-Gault, Charlayne. Skype Interview- Khadija Farah. November 30, 2012.