Longtime New York Times writer Jonathan Hicks has passed away at the age of 58. According to his wife, Christy Deboe Hicks, he had pancreatic cancer.
As a business and politics writer who began his career at The Plain Dealer of Cleveland and The Arizona Daily Star, Hicks joined the Times in 1985, left in 2009, and later had become a columnist for the New York Amsterdam News. He also served as a research fellow at the DuBois Bunche Center for Public Policy at Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn, New York.
While at the Times, he reported on the campaigns of Mayors David N. Dinkins and Rudy Giuliani. In his coverage of City Council and congressional races, he reported on the changes in the political landscape with regard to ethnicity and demographics.? ?
Most recently, he joined BET.com as a senior national correspondent.?
Born in St. Louis in 1955, Hicks attended the University of Missouri and the Maynard Institute?s Summer Program for Minority Journalists. His father, John H. Hicks, is credited with being the first Black reporter at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.?
In 2010, Hicks and his wife founded the J.P. Hicks Family Mass Communication Scholarship, a grant for aspiring Liberian journalists attending the University of Liberia.
He is survived by his wife, his parents, a daughter, Lindsay; two brothers, Geoffrey and Michael; and a sister, Louise Hicks Wilson.
