On Feb. 28, 2024, Xernona Clayton spent an evening walking an audience through decades of Atlanta civil rights and media history. The 93-year-old broadcaster and organizer sat down with Royce Bable, producer of the YouTube interview series Sweet Auburn Stories, before an invited crowd at an event hosted by the Carter Center and the Dutch Consulate of Atlanta.
Bable, a Howard University graduate based in Atlanta who calls himself a novice historian, launched Sweet Auburn Stories in 2019 to record the experiences of Black trailblazers. In the five years since, his guests have included activists and business founders such as Herchelle Sullivan Challenor, Roslyn Pope, Mack Wilbourn and Lonnie Johnson. This year Clayton joined that list for a long-form conversation covering her childhood, her Hollywood years, the movement and her media work.
Bable opened with a memory game, offering single words as prompts. The first was Jet, the magazine where Clayton's husband, journalist Ed Clayton, worked in the early 1960s. She joked that she had asked him to keep her out of its pages, and that party hosts who hoped an invitation to her would land them in the magazine had it backwards. During those years in California, she threw fundraisers for the movement at the homes of film stars including Elizabeth Taylor and Gregory Peck.
From there the talk moved back to her beginnings. Clayton grew up a twin in Muskogee, Oklahoma, in the 1930s and 1940s, the daughter of a pastor in a family connected to the Bureau of Indian Affairs. She studied at Tennessee State University and the University of Chicago, and while in Chicago she worked with the Urban League and pushed Marshall Fields, the department store she loved, to integrate its workforce.
Her Hollywood fundraising brought her to the attention of Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta Scott King, whom Ed Clayton introduced her to. The Kings urged her to relocate to Atlanta and join the movement there. Clayton drew laughs recounting the offer: a new car, a maid, a good salary and, somehow, a dog. None of it materialized after she arrived, she said, teasing that the minister did not always keep his word.
In Atlanta she worked alongside the Southern Christian Leadership Conference on the effort to desegregate the city's hospitals. Through a Model Cities program she came to know Calvin Craig, then Grand Dragon of the Georgia Ku Klux Klan.
Television came next. After substituting for Atlanta Constitution editor Ralph McGill on a TV special, Clayton became the first Black person in the South to host a program of her own. The Xernona Clayton Show ran seven seasons on WAGA-TV, and among its best-known moments was her interview with Craig. She later joined Turner Broadcasting, where Ted Turner took notice of her and she rose to become one of the company's top-ranking women, creating the Trumpet Awards along the way.
Her name now sits on the city itself. Since 2023 she has been the only woman with an Atlanta street plaza and statue named for her.
Bable closed the evening on a lighter note. He said he had asked ChatGPT to write Clayton a tagline as though she were joining the cast of the Real Housewives of Atlanta. The room erupted, Clayton fired back a quip of her own, and the AI's suggestion turned out to be a line about shattering glass ceilings with style.
GPB's original report includes video of the full conversation.
Original reporting by Kristi York Wooten for GPB News.