The Alumni Distinguished Service Award recognizes Winthrop alumni who significantly
contribute to the quality of life in their community, the development of values and
morals within others and who serve as outstanding citizens. Delores Johnson Hurt '68
is one of four alumnae who are the 2017 recipients of this award.
Hurt is a civil rights, journalistic and entrepreneurial trailblazer with professional
experience as a news reporter/anchor, non-profit administrator, business owner and
educator.
She came to Winthrop as the first African-American student accepted into the college
and finished in 1968 as the first black undergraduate with honors. Her four-year stay
was funded by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. Hurt attuned herself well at Winthrop:
she was a marshal, vice-president of the school's Phi Kappa Phi National Honor Society
and was named to Who's Who Among American Colleges and Universities, along with other
honors.
Following graduation, Hurt attended the University of Nice in France on a Fulbright-Hays
Fellowship and during breaks from school traveled throughout Europe and North Africa.
She continued her education by earning an M.S. from the Columbia University Graduate
School of Journalism in New York City.
Early in her career, Hurt worked as a journalist in New York City at radio stations
WRVR and WBAI, The National Black Network and the CBS Radio Network. She also wrote
articles for the "Black Enterprise" and "Encore American and World-wide News" magazines
in New York. Returning to the South, she taught journalism at Benedict College and
was hired as only the second African-American journalist to work at WIS Radio, an
NBC affiliate in Columbia, S.C.
Hurt founded Nefertiti, Inc., a non-profit arts organization that brought Broadway
plays to South Carolina. She also served on the executive committee of the Columbia
Chapter of the NAACP, and on the boards of the Richland County Township Auditorium
and the City of Columbia Action Council. Hurt worked at the Rockefeller Foundation
in New York City, providing scholarships to doctoral candidates, and co-owned a restaurant
in Key West, Fla., and a wholesale bakery, "Anne's Simply Delicious Cakes and Pastries,"
in Columbia, S.C.
When Hurt moved to Charlotte, N.C., she returned to her first love, French language
and culture, and taught high school students in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg School system.
Because of her civic activities in Charlotte, Hurt was inducted into the Women's History
Hall of Fame at the Levine Museum of the New South in 2011.
As Winthrop approached its 125-year anniversary in 2011, Hurt urged the university
to acknowledge its desegregation in the 1960s, in which Hurt and others took part.
In 2014, the university produced a well-received celebration of the school's 50th
anniversary of the desegregation of the university.
Hurt retired from the Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools in 2012 and joined the League
of Women Voters Charlotte Mecklenburg two years later. In 2016, she became, and continues
as president - only the second African American to lead the organization in its nearly
100-year history. She shares life in Charlotte with daughter Vashti L. Hurt.
