REMEMBER THE ‘60s? : THE PROTEST : IN MY PLACE, <i> By Charlayne Hunter-Gault (Farrar, Straus & Giroux: $19; 257 pp.)</i>

On Feb. 1, 1960, four black college students sat down at a segregated lunch counter in Greensboro, N.C. and demanded to be served. Instead of being given lunch, the quartet was whisked off to jail. Their single act of defiance made national headlines and paved the way for a new era of massive civil disobedience as thousands of blacks began to resist the legalized oppression fostered by a segregated society. College students formed the vanguard of this movement and produced some of the most brilliant strategists for social revolution the world has ever known.

And there were others whose blows against the system weren’t sustained by the cohesive solidarity of a single-minded crowd, whose strides toward freedom were lonely marches. The same year the Greensboro Four staged the first sit-in at Woolworth’s, Charlayne Hunter-Gault, a recent high school graduate living in Atlanta, took her place in the pantheon of African-American heroes and she-roes when she integrated the University of Georgia at Athens. That decision catapulted Hunter-Gault, now national correspondent for the MacNeil/Lehrer Report, and Hamilton Holmes, the childhood friend who accompanied her, into an endurance test of the human spirit. Her experiences and travails in breaking the color barrier at UGA form the centerpiece of “In My Place,” an evenhanded, sometimes evocative memoir of those turbulent early days of the civil-rights movement.

Hunter-Gault was well aware of the weight of being one of two firsts at such an esteemed bastion of racial exclusivity. UGA wasn’t Harvard but, according to her, it “was through such critical institutions that white privileges and power were nurtured and preserved.” The experiences that Hunter-Gault chronicles here run the gamut: There is the expected violence of raging whites, but she found surprising kindness and bravery as well. Angry crowds of white students chanting “Nigger, go home” greeted her arrival and yet, several of her dorm mates welcomed her pleasantly when she moved in.

On her first night on campus she fell asleep to a dissonant serenade: “Two, four, six, eight. We don’t want to integrate.” But several days later, when enraged students hurled bottles into her room, a white girl she barely knew came to stay with her. Later she encountered professors who clearly objected to her presence as well as some who invited her home for dinner and martinis. Her journey through UGA taught her to take nothing for granted. She even found love on the other side of the color barrier and stunned many when she married her white college sweetheart.

The Hunter-Gault who was tough enough to face down a mob was nurtured by loving, middle-class parents and a caring black community, people who managed to give her a sense of self-esteem despite the harsh realities of American apartheid that shackled their lives. Her father was an army chaplain; her mother was a teacher. Young Charlayne grew up knowing she was expected to achieve academically and later professionally.

The rich texture that informs “In My Place” is the enduring Southern black culture, full of hope and pride that refused to be snuffed out by oppression. Born in the hamlet of Due West, S.C., Hunter-Gault remembers a childhood filled with vegetable gardens, outhouses, church on Sundays and yes and no ma’am. She recalls being corrected not only by her parents, but by teachers and neighbors who knew the true meaning of extended family.

But although the pristine beauty and mores of the rural South were idyllic, the impact of its social system was harsh and debilitating. The Hunters fled their tiny town and later Covington, Ga., in search of better education for their three children. The segregated schools of the ‘40s that Hunter-Gault attended were places without blackboards, with rough-hewn desks, with no heat or plumbing and tattered hand-me-down books thrown out by white schools. Hunter-Gault describes a petition that black parents filed to improve the facilities, shedding light on the fact that the activism that fueled the historic Brown vs. Topeka decision was the collective work of many blacks across the nation:

“The Reverend J. A. Delaine and a group of black parents, including Harry Briggs, a black mechanic, petitioned their local, all-white school board for help--not even in bringing the poor black schools up to par with the white schools, but just to get a bus so that the black children, like the white children, would have a somewhat easier time going the often long distances they had to travel to their little country schools. The school board turned them down, and they went to court, asking them not just for a bus but for school buildings, services and education equal to whites.”

Hunter-Gault writes in the dispassionate voice of a journalist, and this straightforward style sometimes minimizes the impact of her story. There is a lack of introspection in some of the memories she provides and one longs for her to flesh out details and commit more of her feelings to the page. The drama is too often in the events themselves, not in the writing.

Fortunately, most of the recollections that Hunter-Gault chooses to share are stirring. There is rich history to be mined here. Hunter-Gault’s depiction of the panoply of civil-rights leaders who provided her with legal, moral and educational assistance reads like a Who’s Who of great black Americans. M. Carl Holman, Vernon Jordan and the formidable Constance Baker Motley were her friends and confidants. When she provides insight into the characters that, sadly, most of us only learn about during Black History Month, her words sing and we are glad that Hunter-Gault kept her eyes on the prize and managed to do us all proud.