Up Front | From the Editor

June 1999: Vol. 78, No. 3

heard that Charlayne Hunter-Gault had won a second Peabody Award for her coverage of Africa before she did. We'd been talking on e-mail from Johannesburg to Athens to put together the cover story for this issue (see this page). But I couldn't offer congratulations until she got the official word from UGA's Peabody director Barry Sherman that she had again won the broadcast-cable industry's most prestigious award.

Hunter-Gault has won two Peabodys for her Africa coverage—one for PBS's "McNeil-Lehrer Report," the other for National Public Radio.

"Charlayne is a great storyteller," says Ron Nessen, the former White House press secretary who chaired the Peabody's radio committee. "She uses real people in real villages to illustrate major points about Africa. Most stories about Africa are full of government statements, which makes your eyes glaze over. But Charlayne tackles complex economic problems and rivalries that go way back in history—and yet makes them understandable by enormous layering of detail."

And what is a person's life but an enormous layering of detail. Readers will learn a lot about Africa from Charlayne's story, but they'll also learn something about the kind of person she has become since she graduated from UGA back in the racially charged 1960s.

Race has always been an issue in her life. Consider the story she tells of the Nigerian man who asked her "how I was able to find other white people to braid my hair. When I informed him I was an African American, he was incredulous."

How ironic—nearly four decades after her admission to UGA caused such a stir because she was black—that Charlayne would be mistaken for white. She told me it had happened to her before in Africa.

"In 1985, I went to a black beauty salon, thinking that, as in America, it would be full of gossip and story leads. When I told the receptionist I wanted a wash and set, she said, 'I'm sorry, we only do black hair.' Those were the days of rigid segregation of races by color—black, white, and colored—and I just laughed and thanked her. Sometimes humor is the only way to deal with absurdity—and still stay sane."

On those occasions when she's returned to campus for the Holmes-Hunter Lecture series or for her recent Hill Lecture, Charlayne's gracious manner makes it pretty clear she has always known who she is.

"I remember winning a contest in elementary school back in Covington, Georgia," she says. "The prize was a tiara and the coveted title of Queen of the School. That was my armor then, and I will continue to wear it in the millenium to come."