Dan Rodricks: The Pratt Library prepares to honor long-time journalist DeWayne Wickham

At a time when the Trump administration tries to repress free speech and limit the mainstream news media’s coverage of the White House, the Enoch Pratt Free Library is in the process of celebrating one of Baltimore’s most accomplished journalists — and it’s not H.L. Mencken this time.

With no disrespect to the Sage of Baltimore, the curmudgeonly columnist and iconoclast who was one of the most famous American journalists of the early 20th Century, the Pratt next month will officially turn the H.L. Mencken Room of the central library into a room named for DeWayne Wickham and devoted to journalism. Carla Hayden, the Pratt’s former director and former Librarian of Congress, encouraged the tribute and new use of the Mencken Room.

DeWayne Wickham is a Baltimore native who has had a long and distinguished career as a print and broadcast journalist — he wrote a column for USA Today for three decades — and was the founding dean of journalism at Morgan State University.

Wickham, whose career spans six decades, has been working with Pratt staff to organize his papers, photographs and many of the recorded interviews he conducted over the years with political and civil rights leaders.

A Vietnam-era Air Force veteran, Wickham got his start in journalism as a newspaper intern with Mencken’s paper, the bygone Evening Sun, in the early 1970s. He was Capitol Hill correspondent for U.S. News & World Report during the Watergate years, then returned to Baltimore as a reporter with the morning Sun from 1975 to 1978. 

Wickham also worked for Black Enterprise magazine, CBS News and BET News, and he served as host of a talk show for WBAL-TV for several years.

In the mid-1980s, Wickham started writing his weekly syndicated column on a wide range of national affairs for USA Today. He did that for the next 30 years, and the influential job brought him into contact with world leaders such as Nelson Mandela, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Fidel Castro and Barack Obama. 

Wickham has an impressive record as a founder: A founding member of the National Association of Black Journalists (NABJ), and its president from 1987 to 1989; a founder, in 2000, of the Institute for Advanced Journalism Studies at North Carolina A&T State University; founding dean of Morgan’s School of Global Journalism & Communication, and a founding member of The Trotter Group of Black newspaper writers and journalists.

He is the author of three books: “Woodholme, A Black Man’s Story of Growing Up Alone,” “Bill Clinton and Black America” and “Fire At Will,” a collection of his columns. Wickham also served as the editor of “Thinking Black: Some of the Nation’s Best Black Columnists Speak their Mind.”

In recent years, Wickham has been working on documentaries that twice took him to Cuba, a nation of long interest to him. The subject of one of his documentaries is Victor Dreke, a commander in the Cuban revolutionary army dispatched to help nations in central and western Africa break from colonial rule. Wickham recently interviewed Dreke in Havana.

An earlier Wickham-produced film, “History of a National Treasure: The Documentary Story of Morgan State University,” won a regional Emmy Award in June. 

To make way for the new Wickham Room at the Pratt, the collection of Mencken papers and artifacts has been moved into the library’s Special Collections department and will be available for viewing upon request. 

Mencken, a lifelong Baltimorean who wrote for The Evening Sun when he was not editing magazine articles or writing books, died in 1956 at age 75. He left his letters, his personal library, and manuscripts and proofs of articles and books to the Pratt. His typewriter is part of the collection.

Dozens of books and scholarly papers about Mencken have been published over the last several decades, and the Pratt said in a statement that it continues to recognize his contributions to Maryland and American journalism. But requests for access to the collection have fallen off. 

Also, the Mencken Room has only been open to the public each year on Mencken Day, on the Saturday closest to his birthday of Sept. 12. 

The rededicated room will be open to the public and used for library events.

From Chad Helton, the library’s president and CEO: “The Pratt Library will use the DeWayne Wickham Room to recognize both Wickham and all important Maryland journalists and publications, both historic and contemporary. There will be listening stations where researchers can listen to Wickham’s interviews and other recordings. 

“The Enoch Pratt Free Library stands up for the freedom of the press and recognizes that accurate, unbiased, uncensored, and investigative journalism are crucial to the success of our democracy. The dedication of this new room will highlight these resources and will inspire current and future journalists to report the truth.”