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Early life
Alberta Charlayne Hunter was born in Due West, South Carolina, the oldest child of Col. Charles Shepherd Henry Hunter, Jr., U.S. Army, a regimental chaplain, and his wife, the former Althea Ruth Brown.

She became interested in journalism at age 12 after reading the comic strip “Brenda Starr, Reporter”.

In 1955, one year after the Brown vs. Board of Education ruling, Hunter was in eighth grade and  became the first black student at an Army school in Alaska, where her father was stationed. Her parents divorced after spending the year in Alaska, and Hunter moved to Atlanta with her mother, two brothers, and maternal grandmother.

After moving to Atlanta, she attended Henry McNeal Turner High School where she became editor-in-chief of The Green Light, the school’s newspaper, assistant yearbook editor, and Miss Turner High. While in high school, at age 16, she, along with two friends, converted to Catholicism after being raised as a follower of the African Methodist Episcopal Church.

In 1958, members of the Atlanta Committee for Cooperative Action (ACCA) began to search for high-achieving African-American seniors who attended high schools in Atlanta. They were interested in jump-starting the integration of white universities in Georgia. They were searching for the best students so that universities would have no reason to reject them other than race. Hunter, along with Hamilton Holmes were the two students selected by the committee to integrate Georgia State College in Atlanta. However, Hunter and Holmes were more interested in attending the University of Georgia.

The two were initially rejected by the university on the grounds that there was no more room in the dorms for incoming freshmen who were required to live there. That fall, Hunter enrolled at Wayne University (later Wayne State University) where she received assistance from the Georgia tuition program on the basis that there were no black universities in the state who offered a journalism program.

Despite meeting the qualifications to transfer to the University of Georgia, she and Holmes were rejected every quarter due to the fact that there was no room for them in the dorms, but transfer students in similar situations were admitted. This caused court case Holmes v. Danner in, in which the registrar of the university, Walter Danner, was sued. After winning the case, Holmes and Hunter became the first two African-American students to enroll in the University of Georgia on January 9, 1961.

Hunter graduated in 1963 with a B.A. in journalism.