The National Civil Rights Museum has announced that Charlayne Hunter-
Gault, an American journalist and one of the first African American
students to enroll in the University of Georgia, is one of the recipients of its 2014 Freedom Award.
Other recipients of this year’s award include Robert Moses, award-winning educator and civil rights movement organizer; and Frank Robinson, trailblazing professional baseball player and manager.
From Market Watch:
Charlayne Hunter-Gault, International Freedom Award honoree, is an award-winning journalist with more than 40 years in the industry, working in every medium. She began her journalism career as a reporter for The New Yorker and later worked as a local news anchor for WRC-TV in Washington, DC, and as the Harlem bureau chief for The New York Times. As a global journalist, Hunter-Gault worked as NPR’s chief correspondent in Africa and CNN’s Johannesburg Bureau Chief and Correspondent. Hunter-Gault joined NPR in 1997 after 20 years with PBS, where she worked as a national correspondent for NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.
Hunter-Gault was one the heroic students who integrated universities in the American South. In her From Jim Crow America to Apartheid South Africa & Beyond: An Activist Journalists Journey, Hunter-Gault describes her historic entry into the University of Georgia as its first black woman student and the road she took through Jim Crow South to get there. She chronicles her rise from there to the top of her profession and the stories she covered along the way including South Africa’s Jim Crow-like system of Apartheid and the victory of its people over the system.
Her numerous honors include two Emmy awards and two Peabody awards — one for her work on Apartheid’s People, a NewsHour series about South African life during apartheid, and the other for general coverage of Africa in 1998. Hunter-Gault also was the recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Association of Black Journalists, the American Women in Radio and Television award and a 2004 National Association of Black Journalists Award for her CNN series on Zimbabwe. Amnesty International awarded Hunter-Gault for her human rights reporting, especially her PBS Series, Rights and Wrongs, a human rights television magazine. In August 2005, she was inducted in the National Association of Black Journalists Hall of Fame.
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