Meet the man who built J-school at Morgan State
He would transform the department’s journalism program in just one year
The photo accompanied DeWayne Wickham’s last column at USA Today. He sits next to President Barack Obama around a large table in the Roosevelt Room of the White House. Presidential aide Valerie Jarrett is there too, as well as other Black journalists. Obama listens as Wickham speaks.
The image is a snapshot of the journalism prestige Wickham has gained in 40-plus years in the business. The Baltimore-born University of Maryland, College Park graduate, a founder and past president of the National Association of
Black Journalists, also co-founded the organization of Black columnists seated around that table, the Trotter Group, to expand opportunities and access for Black journalists at the highest levels of politics and government.
Wickham, who worked a short stint at The Sun, earned that kind of access for himself with fiery columns on the opinion pages of USA Today for 30years starting in 1985. He never shied away from controversial issues like advocating for normalized relations with Cuba or denouncing the way America treated Haitian refugees at Guantanamo Bay during the presidencies of George H.W.
Bush and Bill Clinton.
At the time of the White House photo, Wickham was already embarking on a new endeavor, one that brought him in 2012 to the campus of Morgan State University as chairman of what was then the Department of Communication Studies. In just one year, he would transform the department into a fullfledged journalism school at Maryland’s largest historically Black university.
The goal was to provide a path for more people of color to embark on careers in the largely white industry. Wickham became the school’s first dean, a job he will retire from this spring.
When he first arrived at Morgan, people thought his goal to transform the journalism program in a year’s time a lofty one.
“People snickered,” he said, when President David Wilson told faculty of his plans. ”They snickered.”
Just in case the snickers weren’t enough to communicate the extent of skepticism, there was one last diss as the session ended — from a worker at the physical plant.
“You know, that’s not going to happen,” Wickham remembered the man saying, a memory that still makes him laugh.
Had that co-worker known the incredible challenges Wickham had overcome, he might not have been so incredulous. Orphaned at the age of 8 after the murder-suicide of his mother and father, Wickham grew up in dire poverty in Cherry Hill, initially at the home of an aunt, one of nine people living in four rooms with concrete floors, he wrote in an autobiography.
He dropped out of high school and joined the Air Force, where he was trained in combat photography before being sent to Vietnam at the height of the war in 1967. Honorably discharged in 1968, and having earned a G.E.D. in the military, he worked his way through
journalism school as a medical photographer and a parttime salesperson, with the help of the GI Bill.
Mere snickers were not going to deter him.
After just nine months, Wickham’s proposal for the School of Global Journalism & Communication cleared all the approval processes of both Morgan and the Maryland Higher Education Commission. Last year, the school earned full accreditation from the Accrediting Council on Education in Journalism and Mass Communications — the ultimate stamp of approval for journalism programs — on the first try with a unanimous vote.
“I believe the development of the school during Dean Wickham’s time was one of the most remarkable initiatives I have seen in chairing more than 100 accreditation visits in this country and abroad,” said Will Norton, former dean of the University of Mississippi School of Journalism and New Media, who led the team that approved the accreditation. “His vision for what is needed in education was so clear and well-formulated, and his connections to people in the media are spectacular.”
With that accreditation in hand, the 74-year-old Wickham told the Board of
Regents his work was done and he would step down in May.
“I want to do something else,” Wickham said. “For me, this job has been accomplished. The president asked me to come and build a school of journalism with national standing at Morgan State University. He asked me to get that school accredited. And the school was accredited.”
As easy as he made it look, Wickham faced challenges at Morgan, namely criticism over his lack of an academic background.
“There was a level of distrust among some of the faculty members … who saw me as an interloper,” he said.
But his professional journalism background, and expansive network, were exactly what made him right for the job, said Jacqueline Jones, an assistant dean and chair of the department of multimedia journalism at Morgan.
“DeWayne Wickham was the best person to create and launch a program of this kind,” said Jones. “Part of that is he has vision. But he also has focus and drive.”
Wickham shook up the typically slow pace of academia with his decisiveness, Jones said. “He will consult, and he will weigh options and discussions,” she said. “But at some point,
you’ve got to make a decision and then you’ve got to go with it. … That’s how DeWayne works.”
Wickham also had an academic track record, despite what the critics thought. From 2010 to 2012, he was interim chair of North Carolina A&T’s Department of Journalism & Mass Communication while writing his column for USA Today.
In 2012, Wickham says, a mutual friend arranged for him to play a round of golf with Wilson at the Clifton Park Golf Course in Baltimore, the first of several meetings.
“We talked a lot of journalism, and played just a little golf,” Wickham said.
Said Wilson: “I was looking for a transformational leader for our inaugural dean of the school, and I was not going to elevate the department to a school until I found that leader.”
Wickham had all the qualities Wilson was looking for.
“He was just so seasoned and he understood journalism the way I understood journalism, which was a field where you had to have one foot on a university campus as a leader of a school in the practice of journalism and you had to have another foot in the academic enterprise,” Wilson said.
Wickham’s plan to focus on digital journalism was something that impressed Rep. Kweisi Mfume, a Morgan graduate and chairman of the school’s Board of Regents.
“DeWayne realized properly that African Americans and Latinos were the largest users per capita of smartphones and tablets,” Mfume said. “And he saw a whole vista of training and opportunities there if he could work to develop a curriculum that provided people what they needed when they left the university to be able go and plug into this growing digital journalism field as we now know it.”
Wickham also had a global vision that Wilson and Mfume liked.
“He wanted to find a way to give students an opportunity globally to see the world, to report on the world, to understand the issues of the world and try to develop journalism around that,” Mfume said.
Exposing Black journalists, who rarely get foreign correspondent gigs, to global opportunities had long been important to Wickham. Before coming to Morgan, he spent two decades taking groups of them abroad to visit and report from such countries as Cuba, Columbia, Brazil and Panama to expand their resumes and experiences.
Organizing these trips also helped Wickham hone his fundraising abilities, a handy skill for building a journalism school. The school will bear the fruits of his work long after Wickham leaves.
Last month, NBCUniversal announced a partnership that included $500,000 for the School of Global Journalism & Communication, a decision it made in part based on Wickham’s reputation.
“Wickham’s School of Global Journalism creates a direct pipeline from Morgan State’s classrooms to newsrooms all over the country. NBCUniversal News Group is thrilled to help keep that legacy alive,” Yvette Miley, senior vice president of diversity, equity and inclusion, said in an email. She also said Wickham’s columns had long been inspiring to her and others.
The school also has a partnership with The Wall Street Journal and has received major grants from the Ford Foundation, Democracy Fund, The New School and others during Wickham’s tenure.
Tramon Lucas, a 2017 Morgan graduate who is now a digital editor at WBAL-TV in Baltimore, benefited from that pipeline into newsrooms Wickham created.
“I learned so much not just about how to be a journalist but also to manage the business and place myself in the right positions — one of the key things I learned under the leadership of Wickham and other professors,” Lucas said.
While Wickham will be closing the door on his Morgan days in a few months, don’t call it a retirement.
“I am stepping down, not retiring,” he said emphatically.
It’s easy to believe Wickham, given that he is a dynamo of ideas and full of energy. He’s had discussions about writing a book and is also working with actor-producer Tim Reid (“Frank’s Place” and “Sister, Sister”) on possible documentaries, hoping to benefit from new interest by Netflix and Verizon in storytelling in the Black community.
Several journalism schools have come aggressively knocking, something he is not all that interested in.
Wickham can’t imagine not working, having held two or three jobs at a time most of his life. Working was a way out of poverty and having multiple jobs a way to stay out of poverty, he said.
He hesitated a moment when asked if he ever thinks about how far he’s come from Cherry Hill, a past he doesn’t take for granted.
“What I think about,” he said, “is that but for my determination to succeed and the grace of God, I might be just a couple paychecks away from my life in Cherry Hill.”
Calman J. “Buddy” Zamoiski Jr., former CEO of Independent Distributors Inc., a family-owned business, whose far-ranging philanthropic interests included medicine, education and the arts, died Wednesday in his sleep at his home in Easton. The former longtime Harbor Court resident was 93.
“Maryland never had a more passionate advocate for the arts than Buddy Zamoiski,” said former Gov. Martin J. O’Malley. “You could call him a power player, but he played that power for the people of our state and he realized the arts could lift people. He realized the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra could be a powerful representative on the world stage for our state, our economy, and culture, and he played a key role in keeping it financially healthy.”
Ronald R. Peterson, former president of the Johns Hopkins Health System and executive vice president of Johns Hopkins Medicine, is a longtime friend.
“I got to know Buddy when he came on the Hopkins Hospital board in 1977. He was one of the group of business leaders who were very actively engaged with Hopkins, and he became familiar with all facets of Hopkins and could bridge the nuances between the university and Hopkins medicine, and he understood it from both sides,” Mr. Peterson said.
“While he was actively engaged at Hopkins and the BSO, he was also involved with the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, the Jewish community and so many other organizations,” Mr. Peterson said. “We were very happy to have his time at the Hopkins institutions and he recognized the importance of them, and we were lucky to had more than four decades of his service. He could be firm and tough, but he had a kind heart.”
“I knew that Buddy was always there for me and we became good friends. When things sometimes get rough at an institution, Buddy was there behind the scenes asking, ‘How can I help?’ He saw the importance of us working together, and I knew he’d be there for me,” said Dr. Edward D. Miller Jr., former dean of the medical faculty at the Johns Hopkins University who was CEO of Johns Hopkins Medicine from 1997 to 2012.
“For 16 years I knew I could depend upon him. Buddy was honest as the day is long and he always called a spade a spade. He was forthright, but there was never an animosity. He was one of the finest trustees I ever worked with,” Dr. Miller said. “He was committed to our city as well as Hopkins Medical and the University. Raising up all ships was where Buddy was coming from.”
Calman Jacob Zamoiski Jr., son of Calman J. Zamoiski Sr., and his wife, Gertrude Goldstrom “Gigi” Zamoiski, a homemaker, was born in Baltimore and was raised first in Reservoir Hill and later moved with his family to Northwest Baltimore’s Fordleigh neighborhood.
After graduating in 1946 from McDonogh School, he attended the University of Maryland, College Park for a year, before joining the family business, Independent Distributors Inc., established as an electrical supply business by his immigrant grandfather, Joseph M. Zamoiski, and known as the Joseph M. Zamoiski Co. It started in a shop at Baltimore and Hanover streets that eventually expanded into selling record players and battery-operated radios.
After World War I, Mr. Zamoiski’s father returned to Baltimore, established a radio station, WKC, in 1921 that eventually became WCBM and took over his father’s company. In the 1930s, the company began selling appliances, gas ranges, kitchen cabinets and housewares, which eventually came to include television sets and air conditioners.
After his father died in 1972, Mr. Zamoiski took over operation of the Zamoiski Co., which he operated until turning it over in 1994 to his son, James L. Zamoiski, who oversaw the business until his early death in 1997 from a heart attack.
Mr. Zamoiski was chair of the business until retiring in 2008.
His ability to embrace causes as a successful and much-sought-after fundraiser came to define Mr. Zamoiski’s life.
He chaired the BSO board from 1986 to 1990 and again from 1997 to 2003. He was head of the BSO search committee in 1999 that brought Russian conductor Yuri Temirkanov to Baltimore in 2000 as the symphony’s music director. He was deeply involved in the process that made the orchestra’s 2000-seat Strathmore Music Center in North Bethesda a reality.
His board memberships also included the Baltimore Museum of Art, Sinai Hospital, Associated Jewish Federation of Baltimore, Friends School and the Baltimore Community Foundation. He was a director of Mercantile Bankshares and Mercantile Safe Deposit & Trust Co. and a trustee of the Central Scholarship Bureau.
Governor O’Malley appointed him to the Maryland Airport Commission.
In 1994, when the Maryland Institute College of Art announced that it was selling its portion of the famous George A. Lucas Collection, Mr. Zamoiski was one of the members who brokered the deal and convinced a skeptical Gov. Parris N. Glendening of the importance of keeping the collection in Maryland. The BMA purchased it for $8.5 million, with the state contributing $4.25 million.
Mr. Zamoiski was active in Democratic politics.
“He was at the center of political life in our state. When I was mayor and governor, Buddy always took a stand and saw that as his duty. He wasn’t afraid of a political fight, and when he came to elected officials asking them to do something, it was generally for the arts,” Governor O’Malley said.
“When you’re a government leader, you get requests from wealthy and successful people for something that will usually benefit some aspect of their own private business, but that wasn’t Buddy,” he said. “He never asked anything for himself — he was always asking for the arts, and said they needed to be open to all. He really fought for the soul of Maryland.”
Gregory Tucker got to know Mr. Zamoiski when he was public relations head at the BSO.
“Buddy always had a desire to make things happen, and he could make connections and connect all the dots,” said Mr. Tucker, the founder and principal of The Tucker Group LLC, a Baltimore communications firm.
“He had a generosity of spirit and he felt that he was obligated to give back and he did generously. ‘It’s what you do,’ he used to say. He made stuff happen, and would say, ‘Just tell me what you need.’ “Mr. Tucker said. “He had an unpretentious way about him and great humility and was appreciative of the humblest gesture. Buddy was just Buddy from Baltimore.”
Mr. Zamoiski was a member and vice president of Har Sinai Congregation and a member and vice president of the Suburban Club.
He enjoyed hunting, fishing, and eating dinner in the Wine Room at Charleston’s. He was a collector of vintage blue-andwhite Staffordshire china.
His wife of more than 60 years, the former Ellen Levi, died in 2010.
Services were private and there will be no memorial service.
Mr. Zamoiski is survived by his daughter, Clair Segal of Guilford; a sister, Louise Z. Barber of Towson; two grandchildren; and eight great-grandchildren.