Charlayne Hunter Gault’s memoir is providing such a great glimpse into life in the South during the 1940s and 50s and the Jim Crow era. One of the things that stood out to me was how strong sense of place Charlayne had as a young girl. She was proud of where she came from and a knowledge beyond her years of how life was different for her because of where she lived, even though she couldn’t always put those exact words to it.
We know that Charlayne would become the first African American female to register for classes at UGA, and this memoir and snapshot of her childhood and adolescent years give us some information as to how that came to be. We see in the early chapters that Charlayne had a very strong mother figure (see the story of Charlayne’s birth on page 15 for some proof of this woman’s physical strength).
Perhaps even more significant to the story of the woman who would lead the desegregation at UGA is that Charlayne came from a racially integrated family, or as she says it, a family where the “roots were equally tangled” (P. 24). The issues of appearance and white or black colored skin were not foreign ones to Charlayne; they were sources of identity with which she was constantly faced throughout her childhood years. Charlyane and her family portrayed a strong sense of black identity, seen through examples like the one on page 29: “As light as they all were, they always identified themselves proudly as Black, even when they could have easily passed as white in some other location.”
Towards the end of the readings for this week, Chralyane also touches on the breaking of barriers that people like Jackie Robinson were doing (p. 49). Perhaps her trip to Harlem was part of her inspiration to continue to pursue her dreams of being a journalist through the formal education her family valued (p.27).
Through these early chapters, what personal factors did you notice in Charlayne that contributed to her role in UGA’s history? How did you see race affecting Charlayne as a child?
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