'My People' is a collection of stories – spanning decades – about Black America

NPR's Book of the Day

NPR

Books, Arts

4.2 • 672 Ratings

🗓️ 29 December 2022

⏱️ 9 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Charlayne Hunter-Gault is a trailblazing journalist. The first Black reporter for The New Yorker's "Talk of the Town" section, she's spent more than a half-century reporting on the lives of Black Americans. Her newest book, My People, is a collection of pieces written throughout her career that provide a nuanced look at Black communities across the U.S. In this episode, she speaks to NPR's Michel Martin about how our country's understanding of race has changed since she first began working as a journalist, but how some things – like the bans on books by certain authors – kind of stay the same.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, it's NPR's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbaugh. The journalist Charlene Hunter Galt is one of the best in the business. She's out now with a new collection of stories she's written throughout her long career in journalism. It's called My People Five Decades of Writing About Black Lives. Now, today's interview is special for a couple reasons.
0:21.6	One is, I love reading old journalism to shed light on how things have and haven't changed. For
0:28.5	example, there's a piece in this book that she wrote for the New York Times and the 70s about a
0:32.7	dispute center in Harlem that opened as a way of getting police out of minor disputes, which sounds very
0:39.5	familiar to me following the summer of 2020.
0:42.3	And it's also special because she spoke to NPR's Michelle Martin, who clearly looks up to her.
0:47.5	And this conversation is just a tangible look at the impact one person can have as they pave
0:52.7	the way for the generation behind them.
0:55.2	In the U.S., national security news can feel far away from daily life.
1:00.0	Distant wars, murky conflicts, diplomacy behind closed doors on our new show, Sources and Methods.
1:06.6	NPR reporters on the ground bring you stories of real people helping you understand why distant events matter here at home.
1:13.9	Listen to sources and methods on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.
1:20.2	As a little girl, she wanted to write about history, or at least the first draft of it we call journalism.
1:26.4	But along the way, she wound up making history herself,
1:29.3	becoming one of the first black students to integrate the University of Georgia,
1:32.9	the first black reporter for the New Yorker's talk of the town section,
1:36.4	the first to open a Harlem Bureau for the New York Times,
1:39.3	and on and on in a half-century-long career in print and broadcast
1:42.9	that took her all over the country
1:45.0	and to many parts of the world. Now, Charlene Hunter Galt has gathered many of those pieces in a new
1:50.4	collection called My People, five decades of writing about Black Lives. And she is with us now to tell
1:56.6	us more about it. Well, hello there, Queen. Thank you so much for talking with us. Well, I'm so glad to be back
	...

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