A VISIT / CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT : What It Took to Take a Stand : A Journalist Who Helped to Integrate the South Reflects on the Things That Made Her Strong

Perhaps it is only fitting that when Charlayne Hunter-Gault decided to finally sing her song, she would first celebrate it where the melody began.

So her book tour started in the South, where her family’s roots run deep; in Georgia, where she spent her youth; in Athens, where she broke the lock of segregation.

There, in 1961, Hunter-Gault and Hamilton Holmes walked onto a college campus and into history as the first African-Americans to attend the University of Georgia. And there, 27 years later, after returning to make history again, Hunter-Gault says she decided to write her memoir.

“I felt a historical circle had been closed,” says Hunter-Gault, 50, who in 1988 became the first African-American to deliver the school’s commencement address. “And I felt it was time for me to look back.”

Her witty, poignant new book--”In My Place”--more than simply recounts their integration of the university. It also documents a generation’s coming of age and honors the elders who gave her and others the courage to help change America.

“It’s a book about black folks, and black love, and black triumph, as much as it is a book about the desegregation of the University of Georgia,” Hunter-Gault explains. “I think there’s something in it for everybody.”

Promoting a book is a very different experience for the acclaimed journalist who for nearly three decades has listened to the stories of others.

She began her career shortly after graduation, working as an editorial assistant and then reporter for the New Yorker. After a short stint as anchor of a Washington newscast, she moved to the New York Times in 1968, where she specialized in covering the urban black community and operated a one-person news bureau in Harlem. Nine years later, Hunter-Gault left the Times, and in 1978 she joined PBS’ MacNeil/Lehrer Report, where she is a New York-based correspondent.

“It’s a whole different head thing,” Hunter-Gault said of her promotional tour during a recent stop in Los Angeles. “To go somewhere and find people buying your book, not one copy but three, and sometimes four and five, is just the most wonderful experience you can imagine. It’s very gratifying, and humbling in a way.”

Before writing her book, Hunter-Gault says she had never consciously dissected the forces that gave a young black woman the strength to face a hostile, white Georgia crowd day after day in 1961. But she knew something was there, invisibly pushing her. “I instinctively knew,” she says. “I never questioned it.”

Her book weaves the history of peoples into stories about those forces and gives context to that long-ago event. Her daddy’s career as an Army chaplain gives way to a glimpse of the horrors of the Korean War. There is a peek at the great black migration, that massive movement north that once swept her grandparents in its tide.

And there is a look at the history of Atlanta, where W. E. B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington engaged in historic debate at the turn of the century about how blacks could best progress; a city where a black businesswoman bought her own husband out of slavery.

“When you try to explain how it is somebody like me had the confidence, or whatever it took, to get into the University of Georgia without being afraid--and with the confidence that we would prevail--I felt I had to look at all of those things,” Hunter-Gault says.

“We were protected and made to feel whole within the confines of segregation. . . . There were always things that they did to give us another layer of armor.”

The oldest of three children, Hunter-Gault was born Feb. 27, 1942, in Due West, S.C. Her mother and maternal grandmother raised her, as her father moved constantly with the military.

But from time to time the family was together, joining Army Chaplain Charles S. H. Hunter Jr. at bases in Southern California and Alaska. In between, Hunter-Gault and her mother lived in cities as diverse as Cleveland and Covington, Ga., before finally settling in Atlanta.

A statuesque woman with a Southern grace that warms her sophistication, Hunter-Gault has interviewed world leaders and covered peace talks in the Middle East. But the married mother of two still keeps her Southern upbringing in perspective, recognizing it as a critical factor in becoming the woman she is.

Pride hardened her spirit. Her book tells of the black school in Covington that in the 1940s used inferior instructional materials, served pig ears for lunch and gave students orange juice only when white schools had some left.

But “while those teachers could not give us first-class citizenship, they did everything they possibly could to give us a first-class sense of ourselves,” Hunter-Gault says.

She hopes people of all ages and ethnic backgrounds can use the book as a mirror on a nation’s past and future.

“We need to remember that it was only 30 years ago that so many of us got our first-class citizenship rights. . . . Thirty years is not a long time, on the one hand. But then, on the other hand, it’s long enough for a lot more to have been done.

“So it’s kind of a point of departure for assessment, for looking at how far we have come and looking at how far we have to go.”

The book recalls the day-to-day humiliation faced by blacks only a few decades ago: Of her mother’s minister taken into the woods, tortured and left for dead by the Ku Klux Klan after he tried to register to vote; of a white dentist who would see black patients only one day a week, in a room that smelled like an outhouse.

And of the white saleswoman who was pleasant to Hunter-Gault’s fair-skinned mother until she realized her daughter was black.

“ ‘Oh, I didn’t see her,’ ” Hunter-Gault remembers the woman saying with disdain. It marked “the beginning of the consciousness that we are invisible. . . . And so you realize black love was so strong to keep us from crumbling from some of those experiences.”

But the book is also filled with the simple, ordinary tales of any young girl, replete with imaginary friends, high school crushes and baby brothers she rocked to sleep. And sprinkled among the indignities are stories of hope and victory.

“I think when we have economic downturns and people get depressed and frustrated, you tend to get mired down in what we in the South call slow walking and sad talking,” she says. “While I think we can’t just sit by and pretend it’s business as usual, we can’t let the tough times obscure the progress we’ve made.

“I’ve had young people and older people say, ‘Well, 25 years ago you did such and such but look at what we’re still facing.’ And I say, ‘Well, nobody ever said we were going to win this war overnight.’ ”

Still, “we succeeded,” Hunter-Gault says of those who participated in the civil rights movement. “Because of what we did, we don’t have legal segregation anymore in this country. That’s a major victory in the struggle for equality. . . . If there’s been any mistake, it’s to fail to convey that the struggle continues.”

Hunter-Gault sees parallels between the resistance she faced integrating academia and the struggles faced by people of color trying to enter America’s newsrooms.

The field of journalism, she says, is “the one place that presents itself as having as its objective searching for truth. And my question is, how can it be the truth if it’s only what you saw, with your eyes, and you don’t know me? How can you report it with any degree of accuracy?

“We have to make room for all of the voices. . . . I think it’s absolutely critical we have more books like mine, from people who can sing their own songs, tell their own stories, from their own perspective, (to be) joined with other perspectives. Because I don’t think you get at universal truth with one set of eyes. You need many.”

Still, she sees progress in the growing number of African-Americans now working in newsrooms and in the communities she often covers as a journalist, where the love that historically gave strength to the children of American apartheid is still thriving and well.

“We have to be very careful to not become victims of our own media,” Hunter-Gault says. “I think we take some of our bad situations and generalize too much. . . . Many people are trying awfully hard against terrific odds to pass on values and provide their children with armor. Our challenge is to find those who aren’t equipped and help them. I think it’s possible if we have the political and social will.”

Sometimes, she says, victories step out of the past and tap you on the shoulder.

Vernon Jordan was fresh out of Howard University Law School, making about $35 a week, when he began working on the legal staff that helped Hunter-Gault and Holmes get into the University of Georgia. Today, he chairs President-elect Bill Clinton’s transition team.

“I see (that) as a victory,” Hunter-Gault says. Oh, she admits, “you can look at it two ways. Maybe if he (Jordan) wasn’t black, Clinton would be running his transitional committee and he’d be President.”

But “there’s still room for the importance of the symbol. And while Vernon’s position is real power, the image of this black man that close to the seat of power is almost as important as the reality. That in and of itself is progress.”

Once, according to her book, Georgia’s attorney general told Jordan he would not pass the bar--because he did not know his place. “You don’t show any respect,” the official is quoted as saying.

But Jordan made his own place, despite the roadblocks. It is the meaning of Hunter-Gault’s book and of her life story.

“A lot of people miss the symbolism of the title,” she says. “The title comes from the time when white people told black women like me you have to stay in your place. But because of this rich, loving, nurturing (environment), they were never able to define my place. In the end, I, along with Hamilton Holmes, showed them we would define our place.

“And even if it was in what they thought of as their place, if we chose to go there, we could make it our place too.”