Case Western Reserve University honors Martin Luther King Jr.—the holiday, the man and the legacy—with weeklong (Jan. 16-23) activities, including workshops, panel discussions and acclaimed speakers.
The celebration concludes with a keynote address by award-winning journalist and civil rights author Charlayne Hunter-Gault at this year’s Martin Luther King Jr. convocation Friday, Jan. 23, at 12:30 p.m., at Tinkham Veale University Center’s Kelvin & Eleanor Smith Foundation Grand Ballroom. A reception and book signing will follow.
All members of the university and Northeast Ohio communities are invited to observe King’s holiday and recognize his commitment to social justice and global peace.
The event, sponsored by the Office of the President, the Office of Donor Relations and University Events and the Office for Inclusion, Diversity and Equal Opportunity, is free and open to the public, although online registration is encouraged. Visit case.edu/events/mlk to register and for the full schedule of Case Western Reserve events.
Hunter-Gault, with more than 40 years of experience working in every medium in journalism, is a trailblazer in her own right.
She’s written four books: In My Place, a memoir of the civil rights movement based on her experiences as the first black woman to attend the University of Georgia; New News Out of Africa: Uncovering the African Renaissance; To the Mountaintop: My Journey Through the Civil Rights Movement; and, her latest, Corrective Rape, about violence against gay women in South Africa.
Hunter-Gault joined NPR in 1997 after 20 years with PBS, where she worked as a national correspondent for The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. She began her journalism career as a reporter for The New Yorker and later worked as a news anchor for WRC-TV in Washington, D.C., and as Harlem bureau chief for The New York Times.
As a global journalist, Hunter-Gault worked at NPR as a special correspondent after spending six years as CNN’s Johannesburg bureau chief and correspondent. Before that, she worked as NPR’s chief correspondent in Africa.
Her numerous honors include two Emmy awards and two Peabody awards—the first for her work on “Apartheid’s People,” a NewsHour series about South African life during apartheid.
Hunter-Gault has received awards and citations from the National Association of Black Journalists, the Sidney Hillman Foundation, the American Women in Radio and Television and Amnesty International for her human rights reporting.
In 2014, she received the International Freedom Award from the National Civil Rights Museum at the historic Lorraine Motel, where Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated. In 2010, she received the D. C. Choral Arts Society Humanitarian award and, in 2011, was honored with the Fred Shuttlesworth Human Rights Award and the W. Haywood Burns award from New York’s Neighborhood Defender Service. In August 2005, she was inducted in the National Association of Black Journalists Hall of Fame.
Learn more about Hunter-Gault and her upcoming talk in this week’s five questions.
1. Growing up in Georgia in the early 1940s and ’50s, what are your earliest memories of racial segregation and how it affected you?
As a child growing up in a segregated black neighborhood, going to a separate and unequal black school and all-black churches, in many ways, I was the beneficiary of that old African proverb: It takes a village to raise a child. As I wrote in my book, In My Place, we were protected and privileged within the confines of our black community. And while, on Saturdays, we had to go to the segregated picture show, as we called it then, we had a group of friends who had the same loving protection that made us feel whole—despite the laws that attempted to diminish and demean us or the comical black (or black-face) characters on the screen in movies like Gone With the Wind.
Despite the hardships that our parents may have had to endure, as I have said often, when they couldn’t give us first-class citizenship back then, they gave us a first-class sense of ourselves. For example, when my mother and grandmother raised the most money for the annual fundraiser to make up for some of the deficits of our “separate and unequal” school, with its hand-me-down textbooks, often with pages missing, I was crowned “queen” of the Washington Street School. And the notion that I was queen took up residence in my head and stayed there, especially when bigoted white students shouted out [racial epithets] as I entered the [college] campus to register for classes. The crown in my soul that I wore led me to look around for the person they were talking about, because it certainly wasn’t the queen I had been crowned so many years before.
2. In 1961, igniting protests, you were the first African-American woman to enroll at the University of Georgia and one of the first two African-American students to desegregate the school. How did that experience shape your view of the world and your place in it?
I went to the University of Georgia to fulfill my then-albeit short lifelong dream of becoming a journalist, and, for those first tumultuous days, what helped me through them was watching the journalists watching me. And I learned from the good ones, like Calvin “Bud” Trillin, then working for Time magazine, that you don’t have to be detached to be a good, honest journalist as long as you are fair and balanced. Bud wasn’t that much older than I, and he seemed to instinctively know how to relate to me, which got me to open up to him more than many others.
In time, he wrote a most insightful book, which he called An Education in Georgia. As it turns out, we ended up both working for The New Yorker a few months apart. I also determined that, once I achieved my goal of becoming a professional, I would try my best to understand the people I covered by getting as close to them as possible, and also seek out people who had no voice or were portrayed in distorted, stereotypical ways and to try and portray people in ways that reflected their true selves.
3. How and when did you first become aware of Martin Luther King Jr. and his mission?
Many of my friends from high school were involved in the Atlanta Civil Rights Movement, and got Dr. King involved in their protests. In fact, it was on one of their marches that he was arrested with them and was meted out a harsher punishment. He was sent to a penitentiary outside of Atlanta, forced to ride in the back of the police car with a menacing dog—one of the worse experiences of is life, he told Andrew Young, who conveyed it to me years later when I was writing about those times. His treatment led to the Kennedys’ intervention and his freedom.
Soon after, I met him as I was walking on what was then known as “Sweet Auburn Avenue,” so named because it was the black business hub at the time, as well as the location of the Ebenezer Baptist Church, Dr. King’s father’s. And as I spotted Dr. King, I ran up to introduce myself, and before I could finish, he interrupted me, saying that he knew who I was and that he was so proud of Hamilton Holmes [the other student to segregate the University of Georgia] and me. I, for one of the few times in my life, was speechless. I never saw him again but carried his values, including his humility that I experienced that day, in my heart.
4. How has your life’s work as an award-winning journalist and author helped to advance the discussion about social justice?
I am not sure how to answer this, other than to say that I have always sought out people and reported on those who otherwise had no voice. They tended to be people from the South to South Africa, and points in between, who were being denied the full rights. I try to be fair by giving oppressors and others like those who were against my entry into UGA or refused for so many years to deny people of color their full rights in South Africa so that the citizens—viewers or readers—on whose behalf I worked could judge the truth for themselves and, if so moved, could act and support them in one way or another.
5. As keynote speaker for Case Western Reserve’s Martin Luther King Jr. convocation, what will be your message?
I hope to share what helped create my suit of armor and why knowing our history is critical to helping ensure we all wear one and add layers to it as we go through life in order to meet the ongoing challenges of what MLK referred to as “the beloved” and the global community of which we are all a part.