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THE JOURNALISTS

DeWayne Wickham
USA Today

DeWayne Wickham is a columnist for USA Today and the Gannett News Service. His syndicated column is distributed to more than 130 daily newspapers in the United States. Wickham also serves as director of the Institute for Advanced Journalism Studies at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University.

During his journalism career, Wickham has covered the U.S. Capitol for U.S. News & World Report, one of the nation's leading news magazines. He also worked as the Washington correspondent for Black Enterprise magazine and as a reporter for the Baltimore Sun and Baltimore Evening Sun newspapers. Wickham also has worked as an analyst for CBS News and as executive editor of BlackAmericaWeb.com.

Wickham was a Poynter Institute journalism ethics fellow in 2002. During his career, he has covered the Watergate cover-up trial that resulted in the convictions of several top aides to President Richard Nixon. He was a member of the traveling press corps that accompanied Nelson Mandela during his first visit to the U.S. following his release from a South Africa prison in 1990.

In 1994, he was one of a small group of journalists on the State Department plane that returned exiled Haitian President Jean Bertrand Aristide to his homeland. In 1999, he traveled to Cuba and had a 6-hour dinner meeting with Fidel Castro.

A former adjunct faculty member in the University of Maryland's college of journalism, Wickham holds a B.S. degree in journalism from the University of Maryland - College Park; and a Master of Public Administration degree from the University of Baltimore. He is a co-founder of The Trotter Group, an organization of Black columnists, and a founding member and former president of the National Association of Black Journalists. He is also a member of the advisory board of the Newseum, the nation's first interactive museum of news, and the board of visitors of the University of Maryland's Philip Merrill College of Journalism.

In 1999, Wickham was one of the first two recipients of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights chairperson's Award of Special Merit for his "commitment to principles of equality." He is the 2002 recipient of the National Association of Black Journalists' Community Service Award and the organization's 1986 award for outstanding commentary.

The editor of Thinking Black: Some of the Nation's Best Black Columnists Speak Their Mind (Crown Publishers, Inc., 1996), Wickham is the author of Woodholme: A Black Man's Story of Growing Up Alone (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1995), Fire at Will (USA Today Books, 1989) and Bill Clinton and Black America (Ballantine Books, 2002).