[1] 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.
[1] 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.
[9] Challenor found the students in Kentucky politically apathetic for her tastes,[6] 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.
[11] While a doctoral candidate at Columbia she lived in Benin from 1967 to 1968, doing research for her thesis:[12] French Speaking West Africa's Dahomeyan Strangers in Colonization and Decolonization.
[17][5] Early in her tenure as co-chair, Challenor helped arrange for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., to join the students in simultaneous, peaceful COAHR-organized sit-ins at lunch counters around Atlanta.
[6] Challenor quickly became the student spokesperson for the Student-Adult Liaison Committee, a group formed over the summer of 1960 to show a unified African-American front in the fight for desegregation in Atlanta.
[24] For example, when the Student-Adult Liaison Committee decided to work together to extend the boycott of lunch counters to all downtown Atlanta businesses, Challenor called a press conference with Reverend William Holmes Borders announcing the broader initiative.
[27] April, 1961, Challenor, Benjamin Brown, Charles Lyles, and Lonnie King filed a federal lawsuit against "public" facilities owned by the city.
By this time, Challenor was already studying at Johns Hopkins University and was no longer an active member of the Atlanta Student Movement.
[28] In 2010, the Jimmy Carter Presidential Library & Museum honored Challenor along with thirty-four other women who fought for civil rights in Atlanta.
[30] From 1969 to 1972, she served as an assistant professor at the City University of New York, Brooklyn College Department of Political Science during which time she was also a Fellow at Adlai Stevenson Institute of International Affairs in Chicago (1970-1971).
[12] The same year, presidential nominee Senator George McGovern selected a panel of foreign policy advisors, including Challenor.