Summer Voices - Charlayne Hunter-Gault

Legendary journalist and civil rights icon Charlayne Hunter-Gault, our guest editor this week, spotlights Stacey Abrams and others who carry “the torch of freedom.”

here are times when the stars seem to align in my life (look for this phrase in my conversation with Stacey Abrams because it’s coming 'round again). And this was the case when I was approached to be a guest editor for The Bitter Southerner, a magazine I have come to admire and, yes, learn from, given so many of its gifted contributors and editors.

Like so many of us in this difficult moment in history, I was being continually bombarded with despair from so many directions, including the media … well, not all media. The Bitter Southerner stands out as a shining star, its content aligning with my feelings about what are, for sure, challenging times.

I’ve had to forgo a lot of the things I normally enjoy — going to parties and giving them (yes, I LOVE giving parties) or going to the movies or the theater with my Squad — eight sisters of varying ages who I Zoom with once a week. (These women often share my passions and my perspectives — and when they don’t, their well-thought-out arguments can always either change my mind or, in a sisterly way, tolerate my different point of view.) I also no longer think of “leaving on a jet plane,” as that old song goes, to visit some inviting destination or to celebrate still another upcoming wedding anniversary on the Rock of Gibraltar, where Ron and I were married nearly 50 years ago. (Yes!)

But among the things that have helped keep me reasonably sane is the thing that has always enabled me to overcome  — and that is the history of our people and how they have ALWAYS overcome, even when the road was otherwise dark and dreary. 

I grew up in the segregated South, at a time when the white powers that be did everything they could to keep us in our place — as defined by them — a place of inferior being and second class in every way, including the hand-me-down textbooks they sent to our Black elementary school — often with pages torn out. In those days, when our Black teachers couldn’t give us first-class citizenship, they still gave us a first-class sense of ourselves, teaching us a history dating back to the 1500s, when the feet of the first enslaved Africans touched down on the soil that eventually came to be the United States of America.

Yes, Black people have always carried the torch of freedom in their minds and passed it on to their children. I call it our armor.

I was bequeathed the armor created by women like Ida B. Wells, a Black crusading journalist who became one of my early inspirations on my journalistic “journey to the horizons,” a phrase I borrow from another one of my inspirations — the writer Zora Neale Hurston. And there were countless others who inspired generation after generation, however “stony the road we trod,” as James Weldon Johnson wrote in “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” the song that ends with this great command: “Let us march on till victory is won.”

And I have personally witnessed some of that victorious marching. When I graduated from high school, I applied to the all-white University of Georgia, along with my classmate Hamilton Holmes. I had left the state while the case was making its way through the courts, when some of my slightly older classmates began marching to end segregation in Atlanta, following, but determined to outshine, the students in Greensboro, North Carolina, who actually started the sit-in movement and the precursor to the end of the lie of separate but equal.

In Atlanta, the student protesters created what came to be known as the Atlanta Civil Rights Movement, and they produced a significant document in 1960 called “An Appeal for Human Rights.” Some of them, like me, had been inspired by the Black history we learned at a school named for a Black fighter for full freedom, Henry McNeal Turner. It was impossible for us to enter those doors without learning his history and all it entailed.

We stand on the shoulders of giants, we learned, and we are protected by their armor.

By the time Hamilton and I had won our case and successfully matriculated at UGA, the Civil Rights Movement had made gains throughout the South. And by the time I took up residence in New York as an editorial assistant at The New Yorker, and later became its first Black reporter, the South was alive with the possibility of freedom and justice for all.

While there was still more work to be done — both down South and Up South, as the more subtly segregated North was often called — the notion of making what young activist John Lewis called “Good Trouble” had become a calling card and a watchword. As it is today.

Now, in this time, when some of us despair that we are still fighting for freedom and justice for all, history teaches us that we must “march on till victory is won.” And that means engaging in activities that keep us feeling “no ways tired” — allowing our rich history to inspire and teach us the way it has taught Stacey Abrams and so many others today how to keep on keepin’ on. And while many are saying that these are the worst of times — because of the raging pandemic and the raging divisive politics, including the debate over the phrase “systemic racism” — The Bitter Southerner is one source of inspiration that exists to give us tools to make not just the South, and not just our immediate world, but the entire world a better place for each and every one of us.

Award-winning journalist, author, and school desegregation pioneer Charlayne Hunter-Gault was born on February 27, 1942. She and Hamilton Holmes were the first Black students to attend the University of Georgia, starting in January 1961. She went on to become a foreign correspondent for National Public Radio, CNN, and the Public Broadcasting Service. Charlayne has also worked for The New York Times and The New Yorker over her nearly 60-year career. She has earned numerous awards for her journalism, including two Emmy Awards and two George Foster Peabody Awards. Charlayne has two children, daughter Suesan, an artist and singer, and son Chuma, an actor and director. Charlayne lives with her husband, Ron Gault, a retired banker, in Sarasota, Florida.