Charlayne Hunter-Gault

Charlayne Hunter-Gault recently left her post as CNN's Johannesburg bureau chief and correspondent, which she had held since 1999, to pursue independent projects. Before joining CNN, she worked from Johannesburg as the chief correspondent in Africa for NPR from 1997 to 1999.

Hunter-Gault was the chief national correspondent for The Newshour with Jim Lehrer on PBS from 1983 to 1997. She had joined the MacNeil/Lehrer Report in 1978 as a correspondent. In 1989, she was also the correspondent for MacNeil/Lehrer Productions' five-part series, "Learning in America." During her tenure at The NewsHour, she won two Emmys and a Peabody for excellence in broadcast journalism for her work on the series "Apartheid's People." She has also received the 1986 Journalist of the Year Award from the National Association of Black Journalists.

After winning a Russell Sage Fellowship to Washington University, Hunter-Gault edited for Trans-Action Magazine. In 1963 she became a reporter at The New Yorker, where she wrote for the "Talk of the Town" section.She went on to work as an investigative reporter and anchorwoman on the local evening news for WRC-TV from 1967 to 1968. She then joined the New York Times as a metropolitan reporter specializing in coverage of the urban African-American community. She won several awards during her ten years there, including the National Urban Coalition Award for Distinguished Urban Reporting and The New York Times ' Publisher's Award. She has also been published in The New York Times Magazine, Saturday Review, The New York Times Book Review, Essence, and Vogue.

Hunter-Gault was born in Due West, S.C., and made civil rights history as the first African-American woman to enter the University of Georgia, where she received a B.A. in journalism in 1962. She also attended Wayne State University. Her book In My Place, a memoir about her experiences at the University of Georgia, was published in 1992. She is the recipient of more than two-dozen honorary degrees.