By Mesa Brown .
The National Association of Black Journalists plans to honor DeWayne Wickham April 30, 2016 at the Region 1 Conference in Baltimore, Maryland.
DeWayne Wickham is currently the dean of Morgan State University’s School of Global Journalism and Communication. He is a former columnist for USA TODAY and co-founder and former president of the National Association of Black Journalists.
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. He was a columnist for Gannett News Service in 1985 and later started writing a column for USA Today.
Wickham has been a hammer for political change. He 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 1992 traveling press corps that accompanied Nelson Mandela during his first visit to this country following his release from a South African prison.
On October 15, 1994, Wickham 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 1995, Wickham led the first delegation of black columnists to the White House for a meeting with President Bill Clinton and led them back for another session in 1997. In February 1999, Wickham traveled to Cuba and had a six-hour dinner meeting with Fidel Castro.
Wickham has said he believes the pinnacle of his journalism career was covering the campaign and presidency of America’s first black chief executive, President Barack Obama. Wickham spoke to Obama on occasion and met with him while he was an Illinois senator. In 2015, President Obama invited Wickham onto Air Force One for the 50th Anniversary of Bloody Sunday in Selma, Alabama. Wickham joined four other African-American journalists at a roundtable aboard the jet. They talked about everything from voting rights to Ferguson to a post-racial America.
In 2012, after nearly three decades as a columnist, Wickham stepped down from USA Today. In 2013, he created and became dean of the School of Global Journalism and Communications at Morgan State University. It is one of only a few schools of journalism at the nation’s historically black colleges and universities.
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Mesa Brown is a Student Social Media Ambassador for the Baltimore Association of Black Journalists. The Montgomery College student is also part of the BABJ Mentor Program.