Herschelle Sullivan Challenor  Herchelle Sullivan Challenor (born 1938) is a foreign policy expert, international civil servant, university administrator, and was one of the key activists in the Atlanta Student Movement, part of the Civil Rights Movement, of the early 1960s. Challenor is the second child of Atlanta natives. Her mother and aunts graduated from Spelman College and her father was a Morehouse College graduate. While Challenor was born in Atlanta in 1938, the Sullivan family moved to Pittsburgh when her father enrolled in graduate school at 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. Challenor was an active member of the Spelman community. She was elected Freshman class president. In 1958 she wrote an article for The Spelman Spotlight, the school paper, entitled “Cowering Experience,” criticizing the traditional rules and lifestyle enforced by the administration upon the students. The school's president, Dr. Albert E. Manley, reprimanded Challenor for the article, and it became a black mark on her record. Nonetheless, Challenor later earned the Merrill Scholarship, which funded a year of study abroad. She went to France and studied at the Sorbonne and the University of Grenoble, where she spent time with African students, many of whom came from countries that were colonized by France. Her experiences in France informed much of her later career. Traveling abroad meant that Challenor graduated a year late from Spelman, but while she was still overseas she was elected Spelman student body president for her final year. Challenor received her Bachelor of Arts from Spelman College in 1961 (though she is often still listed with her original graduating class of 1960). In March 1961, Challenor was among students awarded a scholarship for a summer start to graduate school because the Southern Education Foundation and the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation partnered to encourage students of African-American descent who graduated from Southern colleges to stay in the South to teach. Challenor found the students in Kentucky politically apathetic for her tastes, and instead went on to receive a Master of Arts from Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies in 1963, where she was their first African-American woman to earn a degree.