(instrumental music) - [Reporter] This is a production of WEDU, PBS, Tampa, St. Petersburg, Sarasota.

- [Reporter] Coming up next, our interview with legendary journalist Charlayne Hunter-Gault.

She broke the color barrier in 1961 when she entered the University of Georgia.

Since then, she's traveled the country and the world as a correspondent for some of the leading publications and networks.

She's interviewed some of the major figures of our time and she's out with a new book representing more than five decades of writing about the black experience.

It's all coming up next on Florida this week.

(upbeat music) - Welcome back.

The book is called My People, Five Decades of Writing About Black Lives, and its author Charlayne Hunter-Gault who has written for the New York Times and The New Yorker and has been a correspondent for PBS, NPR and CNN is here with us now, and Charlayne Hunter-Gault.

So nice to see you.

Thank you for coming on.

- Thank you.

I watch you all the time, so I'm happy to be here.

- It's great to have you and you're now in Sarasota so we'll have to talk about that in a moment.

In your book, you talk at towards the beginning about the Southern Poverty Laws Center's description of black history these days.

Summing up it comes down to two people's names and four words, Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, and I Have A Dream.

That seems like a really narrow interpretation of black history.

Is that why you wrote the book to broaden the history?

- I wasn't challenged by anybody.

I would like to think of it as a more positive development.

My late friend and colleague, Valerie Boyd who was the Charlayne Hunter-Gault professor at the University of Georgia's School of Journalism.

We were in touch all the time and she said, "You know, you should put your writing together for the past few years."

And that's how it sort of came about.

And she made some suggestions and then I was able to get a young graduate of UGA to do some of the, help me with some of the research.

And so that's how it all came about.

To fill in some blanks, in fact, a lot of blanks because you mentioned the Southern Poverty Law Center and a few years ago they reported that 85% of the schools in this country didn't teach black history.

And when I think about what Black History has done for me and so many others, I just feel like it's time to expand the curriculum and include some of the stories like the ones I hope people will appreciate in my book.

- One of the stories that comes up throughout your book is you making history yourself when you, as an incoming student integrated the University of Georgia in January of 1961.

Many white students were angry, it wasn't easy for us, for you rather.

Some of the white students rioted.

Tell us what happened to you?

- [Charlayne] What happened to me?

- [Presenter] Yeah.

- Well, actually nothing really happened to me.

I was in my room when the students rioted outside my dorm and threw rocks through the window.

And of course, in those days, young black girls like me who were brought up in the church and as well as those who were demonstrating in Atlanta to bring down segregation, we always wore our best clothes.

And so the first thing I thought about when that brick came through my window and spatted all over my suitcase that's full of clothes, which I hadn't had time to unpack 'cause I'd only been on the campus a couple of days, I thought, "Oh my goodness, my clothes."

But subsequently, the dean came and said that I was being suspended for my own safety.

Now, of course, one of the things that had enraged the riots was that they had lost very hotly contested basketball game with their arch rival Georgia Tech.

So that made a lot of the students even angrier.

And for some reason, I'll never, I've never found out what happened but it took a good while for the police to come and put spray tear gas and get rid of the rioters.

But then there came a time when the dean came to say that I was being suspended, "For my own safety."

And Hamilton Holmes, who was the other black student with me, and we desegregated, we didn't quite integrate.

That took many years.

But when we got to Hamilton's house and told him what had happened he wanted to drive back to Atlanta because that's where they were taking us back home.

That's 70 something miles through some horrific Ku Klux Klan territory.

And I just lost my cool, I mean, I'm normally kind of cool but I lost it that night.

And it was so embarrassing to him that he said, "Okay, okay, okay, we'll go, I'll go with you."

And so we get to, we get to Atlanta and the next day there were journalists coming to ask you know, how scary it was.

And I said, "I wasn't afraid."

And I had never thought about until that moment and that question about being afraid, why I was so calm and not afraid?

And it takes me back to Florida where my mother used to send me every summer to get some of that old time religion from my grandfather and grandmother.

He was a presiding elder in the African Methodist Episcopal Church.

They're all buried in Tampa, by the way.

But my grandmother was the saint and she was the one who taught me the Bible verse, "Yea though I walked through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil."

And when the journalist asked me that next day, it occurred to me that is how I got through that very challenging night from the history, from the Bible, from my grandmother.

And that's what got me through a lot, black history that is so important.

Not just for people who look like me but all kinds of people.

All all of our people need our history because it's useful in so many ways.

It creates what I call armor that helps protect us when we get challenged.

- Did you and Hamilton Holmes think you were making history when you did this, when you entered the UGA?

- We didn't think about that.

In fact, there was some activist black men who came to our high school and said that it had been long enough.

This was 1959, and the US Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board was handed down in 1954.

And so they wanted to test it because it hadn't been tested in Georgia.

So they took us to a white college downtown.

And Hamilton and I actually, we were so well prepared in our, even in our segregated schools which lacked a lot of the things that the white schools had but we were mentally prepared.

And so when we looked at those curriculum, the curriculum, both Hamilton and I didn't think that it met the qualifications we needed to he become a journalist and me become a, he become a doctor and me become a journalist.

So then Hamilton, I have to give him credit walked out onto the deck of Georgia State College pointed north and said, "I wanna go there."

And everybody knew, and I knew he meant University of Georgia and I wasn't gonna let him get ahead of me.

So I said, "Yeah, me too."

And that's how it started.

And the men didn't have any way of protecting us if there were challenges, but here were two young black students willing to take this chance and make this effort, and they had to support us.

And they did and it all worked out in the end as you know.

- I read that you were a big comics fan that you read the newspapers and you saw Brenda Starr in the comics and she was a fearless investigative reporter and you said you wanted to be like her.

She had red hair and blue eyes.

She didn't look like you, if I could say that.

- I didn't even think about that.

And, you know, I was five or six years old and when I went and told my mother that I wanted to be like Brenda Starr one day, she didn't say, "Oh no, that's not what little black girls do."

She said very calmly, "Well, if that's what you wanna do."

And that was all the encouragement I needed at a very young age.

And then of course this is where black history comes in, because in my black segregated schools, we were taught our history.

And one of the people I learned about in addition to Brenda Starr, was Ida B.

Wells.

And Ida B.

Wells was a crusading black journalists who not only reported the news, but she was an activist, encouraging people to vote and, you know, claim whatever it was that they needed to be full citizens.

And so that's where I got my second inspiration Ida B.

Wells.

- After you graduate, you ended up at the New Yorker which is one of the top magazines in the country.

How did you get a chance to work at the New Yorker?

- Well, I'm not sure how Mr. Sean, William Sean, the late great editor of the paper, of the magazine knew about me.

But he had read about me and he got in touch and asked me if I would like to come to New York and talked to him about working for the New Yorker.

Of course, initially I went and he was very wonderful, very kind and gentle and asked if I wanted to join.

And of course, most of the students there were from the upper, from the east coast schools.

But, and I was eventually got promoted to the reporting Talk of the Town.

But initially it was typing, those were the days of typewriter.

And I had to type rejection slips but I also watched what the other writers were doing and many of them were writing reminiscence pieces.

And so I gave that a shot and Mr. Sean liked it and published it, and it's in the book it's called a Hundred and Fifteenth Between Lenox and Fifth.

And I think that was the encouragement that I needed to keep on keeping on.

So, I did another couple of pieces and by that time I had done enough that Mr. Sean thought that I could work for Talk of the Town.

And so he promoted me to the Talk of the Town.

I worked on the 19th floor where his office was and all the other reporters were on the 18th floor.

So getting to the 18th floor was like, "Oh my, I've made it."

(laughs) - So one of the other breakthroughs was you opened up the New York Times Bureau in Harlem.

Was it hard to convince the New York Times management that they ought to open a bureau in Harlem?

I mean, that's part of the city.

So, why didn't they have a bureau in Harlem at this point?

- Well, there were no bureaus in black communities anywhere in the whole country.

And I had spent enough time in my normal routine going back and forth from the New York Times on 43rd Street which is where it was then up, up to Harlem Uptown, that I felt that there were stories that weren't being covered.

And the best way to do that was to be there.

And so I spoke to Arthur Gelb, the editor and told him that I would like to do that.

And, you know, there were things in between but long story short, he gave me the opportunity to do it.

And also the space in the paper to put the stories that in general weren't being covered.

Now, there were other black reporters at the paper just as you know, well, I was the only one at the New Yorker.

So I got a lot of stuff in that magazine about the different things in Harlem.

But I got on, I got into the newspaper in a variety of ways, including what in those days was called the second front.

Now that was where you wanted to be because that's where you got the space and the pictures and everything else.

And so I was supported in all of that by editors.

Of course, I had to make the case.

But being a person of color and living in those communities I had the information, I think to make the case and made the case.

And I'm happy that I did.

- There's some great pieces in the book, My People, you were at The Poor People's Encampment in Washington DC in 1968 after the murder of Dr. King.

You talk about upper class, upper middle class black vacationers on Martha's Vineyard.

You talked to a talented black actor at a major roles in the 1960s and seventies but never got the recognition he deserved.

His name is Woody Strode.

- Oh, yes.

- Influential bookstore owner.

I mean, you really fill out from low income to middle income to high income.

You really fill out a really deep picture of the black community.

- Thank you for saying that in such a nice way.

And to be sure the majority of the book is about my people, but some of my people are also people who are not black people.

And you would read about them, Goodman and Schwerner who gave their lives helping black people achieve equality during the Civil Rights movement.

You would read about my neighbors on Martha Vineyard, whose parents help Rosa Parks after she had been arrested for sitting in on a bus and refusing to give up her seat.

A great civil rights pioneer.

So that while the majority of the book is about people of color, it is also about the kind of people who travel with John Lewis on his first trip south to test the desegregation orders of the Supreme Court on the interstate bus routes.

And when he, when the bus, they signed their wheels before they left, this is how committed they were they signed their wheels before they left Washington DC in the event that they didn't make it all the way to where they had intended to go.

And when they got to South Carolina and got off the bus John got the dubious distinction of being the first of taking the first blow for freedom in the South.

But when he started into the bus station in the front door and these white guys who were hanging out told him he needed to go around to the back door and he said, "I'm here, you know, following the decision of the Supreme Court and on interstate bus routes, desegregating it, they beat the living, you know white out of him.

But three young white boys who had traveled with him who had also signed their wheels, got off and rescued him but then they got beaten.

And so what I'm hoping that the book will do in part is not only to give the history of black people in a way that it was rarely portrayed in the media, but also to include those who supported us.

Viola Liuzzo was one of the white women who lost her life helping in the civil rights movement.

And so were the ones I just mentioned before.

So I'm hoping that in the end we have a broader picture of what my people experienced and survived and prospered from as well as others who helped us.

- For almost two decades, you lived in South Africa.

You watched the transition from being in apartheid state to a democracy.

You interviewed Nelson Mandela.

I gotta ask, was Nelson Mandela angry at his treatment, at his imprisonment, at the system of apartheid?

What drove Nelson Mandela and how did he feel when you talked to him?

- Well, you know, one of the things that got me to South Africa was the protests in America by civil rights activists like Eleanor Holmes Norton, who now is in the Congress in DC and others who protested outside of the South African embassy to help end apartheid.

And so when I first went there, Mandela whom we all call Madiba, was still in prison.

So I didn't get to meet him until he was released.

And every journalist in the world it seemed descended on Soweto his house there in the black community of Johannesburg.

And yet, when I went in 85, and throughout that period from then to the time he was released I developed relationships with the anti-apartheid activist.

So that, and I wrote about them.

And so when he got released everybody else got 10 minutes.

But because I had kept up with the African, ANC, African National Congress, I got a half an hour.

Me and Ted Koppel were the only two with a half hour.

So everybody I said, and I wanna be last and everybody else got their interviews 10 minutes.

And then when it came time I took a chance.

I said, "You know, Mr. Mandela has never had this kind of exposure to television journalists.

I think he should take a little bit of a break.

Could he get a cup of tea?"

I know that was a little chancy, but I felt that deep in my heart that this old man needed a break.

So they said, "Oh, that's a good idea."

So then when he came out and sat down for the interview I also wanted to make myself known in a way that the other journalists weren't.

So I said, "Mr. Mandela, I just wanted you to know that I was in a way a part of the US Civil Rights Movement."

And before I could tell 'em about UGA and all the stories I had written about the Civil Rights Movement, he said, "Oh."

Before I could finish that, he said, "Oh, do you know Miss Maya Angelou?"

And I said, well, I didn't really know her personally but I knew her work.

So I said, "Yes, sir."

And now everybody's looking for a scoop, right?

And when I asked him that question the answer he gave gave me the scoop.

He said, "Well", 'cause everybody wanted to know what he did while he was in prison.

He said, "Well, I read every one of her books."

Did I have a scoop?

Yes I did.

And I couldn't wait to get back to America and tell Maya Angelou because everybody was so excited about Mandela getting out of prison.

And it was a great moment for me that continued throughout the time that I spent, I spent 17 years working in South Africa.

My husband was there working, he opened JP Morgan as Bank after they, after the end of apartheid.

So we were there for 17 years.

And I got to know the country.

And to be perfectly honest, just as, I'm sad about some of the things that are happening in our country today some of them are happening also in South Africa where challenges to democracy are, they're there and yet I think there are people who are gonna continue the good fight.

- I wanna ask you about history and the teaching of history here in the us especially in Florida.

Some people wanna put limits on how history can be taught in schools.

Textbooks are being challenged and being rejected by school boards based on what's coming outta Tallahassee.

Some books are being challenged and banned in schools parents are challenging some of the most prominent black authors and gay and lesbian authors.

What do you think about this movement that's going on here in Florida to limit history and to limit what can be discussed?

- Well, you know, I go back to history to answer that question because Jim Lehrer, my colleague at the NewsHour, PBS NewsHour for many years used to say that give people good information and they will always do the right thing.

And it was the same thing with Edward Armour who talked about television being an instrument that could teach.

And so I believe that, I think that people if they're given good information, we'll do the right thing.

And that's one of the impetus, I think for my book to try and give people good information.

And I'm hoping that people who are having issues with black history will take a look at my book and talk to me, I wanna talk to them about the importance of our history to everybody, black, white, Latin, Asian, whatever color or country they may have originally come from.

This is the United States of America.

And we have always been on the road to a more perfect union.

And I think that part of that trip involves us being I guess, in a sense, protected by our history.

Because when we study our history we learn that there are hard times, tough times, sometimes bad times, sometimes, you know really bad times, violent times.

But we've gotten over them.

And I think that what is important for everybody to know is what has taken this country to where we are today.

Now we have problems, but we also have progress.

We have people like you on television we have people like me, we have younger people.

And so I'm just hoping that this book will help open the eyes of people who may not have seen our history in the way that it needs to be seen which is in a positive way that will help us move in the direction of a more perfect union.

- So, we've got the rise in hate crime, we've got Charlottesville, we've got the rise of groups like The Proud Boys.

You sound like an optimist.

I mean, you talked about South Africa maybe taking some backwards steps too but you sound very optimistic.

- Well, that's my history.

I mean, I was brought up, as I said, I'm called a PK, you know what that is?

A preacher's kid.

So, I've got that in my bones.

But I also have our history in our bones.

You know, we've also, we've had four presidents murdered we've had had civil rights activists murdered.

That's not legal.

That's, that's against the law.

And so one of the, the biggest thing I think we need to do at this point is have people study our history and know that we've had difficulties.

But as Dr. King said, we're gonna have some difficult days ahead but we're gonna get over.

And we have gotten over in the past through some terrible moments.

And as you indicated, we're having some terrible mo- I mean, I'm in tears some nights just watching television and looking at what just happened at the LBGTQ place and other people who have been murdered for no reason, well, you don't murder anybody for a reason.

I mean, I'm not even for the death penalty but I didn't say that.

Okay.

But I think that we just have to keep on keeping on trying to help our country be what it was intended to be for all of its people.

And then having all of its people chat with one another.

You know, one of the things in my book is how I went to the, I went to the ceremony, It was a memorial service for Dr. Kenneth Edelin, who became one of the top protagonists for for women and their rights.

And this was at his memorial service in Boston.

And one of the people who spoke was Reverend Liz Walker who had been a minister and still is.

She was also a journalist.

And she spoke at the funeral.

And one of the things I wrote in the book is in her softly soaring voice, she went on to tell the hushed crowd chapel at Boston University meaning Dr. Edelin, "He probed the most profound depths of life and he confronted his own mortality something few of us are able to do."

And then she concluded with a few words about the many ways people use power, but also of the proper way Edelin used his saying and I quote, and this is what I think is still so relevant today, "Power at its best is love.

Implementing the demands of justice.

And justice at its best is power, correcting everything that stands against love."

Now, if we can teach that, I think that we're gonna have a much more, shall we say, communicative situation where we can talk to everybody and even people who disagree with us, we can do it in a way that is progressive, productive, happy, helpful, towards a more perfect union.

- Beautiful words Charlayne and thank you.

I didn't get to ask you about Sarasota and how you happen to choose that as part of your retirement.

You, but you'll have to come back.

- I will.

Thank you.

I love to talk about Sarasota because I love it.

- All right.

Charlayne Hunter-Gault.

Happy Thanksgiving and thanks for writing your book.

- Happy Thanksgiving to you, gobble, gobble, gobble.

- (laughs)And thank you for joining us.

Send us your comments@ftwwedu.org.

You can view this and pass shows online at wedu.org or on the PBS app.

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And from all of us here at WEDU, have a great weekend.

(upbeat instrumental music) - [Reporter] Florida this week is a production of WEDU, who is solely responsible for its content.