The HistoryMakers

Newspaper editor and columnist N. Don Wycliff was born in Texas in 1946. Driven by the dearth of employment and educational opportunities for African Americans in Texas, Wycliff's parents moved their family to Kentucky in 1954. Wycliff graduated from the University of Notre Dame in 1969. While attending graduate school on a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship at the University of Chicago, he was riveted by local news organizations' coverage of a police raid on the Black Panthers' headquarters on the West Side. Deciding on journalism as a career, he returned to Texas and accepted a position as a general assignment reporter at the Houston Post.

Wycliff worked as a reporter in Ohio, Illinois and Washington before becoming region section editor and assistant to the editor at the New York Times: Week in Review. As a board member of the Times' editorial page from 1985 to 1990, he addressed an array of issues, including religion, race relations, social policy and education. Wycliff joined the Chicago Tribune's editorial staff in 1990. Under his leadership, the page won numerous awards, including a Pulitzer Prize and two Distinguished Writing Awards from the American Society of Newspaper Editors. A member of the Chicago Journalism Hall of Fame, Wycliff has received writing awards and he has evaluated others' work for the Pulitzer Prize and other honors.

Since 2000, Wycliff has been a Tribune columnist and the newspaper's public editor, fielding comments about its reporting, writing and editing. In these positions, Wycliff, influenced by his Catholic faith, unflinchingly reflects on variety of topics, advocating objectivity and justice. He currently serves on advisory councils at Notre Dame and Northwestern universities and at the national associations of minority media executives and black journalists. In Evanston, Illinois, where he lives with his wife, Catherine, and sons Matthew and Grant, Wycliff has served as a Cub Scout leader, sports coach and member of St. Mary's church Parish Pastoral Council.