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

NPR's Book of the Day

NPR

Arts, Books

4.2 • 671 Ratings

🗓️ 19 October 2023

⏱️ 10 minutes

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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-Gault 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.
0:22.0	One is, I love reading old journalism to shed light on how things have and haven't changed.
0:28.3	For example, there's a piece in this book that she wrote for the New York Times and the 70s
0:32.1	about a 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.
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1:15.7	As a little girl, she wanted to write about history, or at least the first draft of it we called journalism, but along the way she wound up making history herself, becoming one of the
1:20.8	first black students to integrate the University of Georgia, the first black reporter for
1:24.9	the New Yorkers talk of the town section, the first to open a Harlem Bureau for the New York Times, and on and on in a half-century-long career in print and broadcast that took her all over the country and to many parts of the world.
1:37.8	Now, Charlene Hunter Galt has gathered many of those pieces in a new collection called My People, Five Decades of Writing About Black Lives.
1:45.9	And she is with us now to tell us more about it.
1:48.2	Well, hello there, Queen.
1:50.0	Thank you so much for talking with us.
1:51.8	Well, I'm so glad to be back together with you.
1:54.4	Long time.
1:55.3	Too long.
1:55.9	And actually, I have to say, just in the spirit of full disclosure, it's very strange to think about interviewing you, because without you, there is no me.
	...

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