Herchelle Challenor
*Herchelle Challenor was born on this date in 1938. She is a Black foreign policy expert, international civil servant, and university administrator.
Herchelle Sullivan Challenor is the second child of Atlanta natives. Her mother and aunts graduated from Spelman College, and her father graduated from Morehouse College. While Challenor was born in Atlanta, the Sullivan family moved to Pittsburgh when her father enrolled in graduate school at the Carnegie Institute of Technology.
She was a preschooler when they moved. Her father became an electrical engineer and then a college professor. In Pittsburgh, her mother also earned her Master's in Social Work. They remained in Pittsburgh throughout her childhood. When they graduated from high school, she and her sister were each offered scholarships from colleges in the north, but both chose to follow in their mother's footsteps to enroll at Spelman College back in Atlanta, GA.
She was one of the key activists in the Atlanta Student Movement, part of the American Civil Rights Movement of the early 1960s. In 2010, the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library & Museum honored Challenor and thirty-four other women who fought for civil rights in Atlanta. Challenor was a member of the speakers' panel at the event.
