Nancy Hicks’s early reporting assignments included racial and political turmoil in New York schools, Chinese medicine and the Apollo space program. Just her presence in the newsroom—as a black woman in the late 1960s—made her a pioneer.
Nancy Alene Hall Hicks Maynard, JD ’87, with her late husband, Robert, owned the Oakland Tribune for nearly a decade. She died September 21 in Los Angeles at 61. The Tribune is the only major metropolitan daily to have been black-owned.
Born in New York, Maynard bristled during her teen years at the media’s negative depiction of her Harlem neighborhood after her former school burned down. She thought newsrooms that better reflected their communities could help prevent that sort of misinterpretation. She graduated from Long Island University in 1966, and began work as a copygirl at the New York Post before joining the New York Times two years later.
After her first husband’s death, Maynard met Washington Post writer Robert Maynard at a conference for black journalists. They married in 1975. The couple bought the Oakland Tribune in 1983 and made it a showpiece of a diversified newsroom. They sold the newspaper in 1992, shortly before Robert died of cancer.
They promoted minorities in the media by co-founding, with others, the Institute for Journalism Excellence, later renamed the Maynard Institute to honor Robert. Nancy Maynard won numerous industry awards and her influence has been felt at newsrooms throughout the country. “She was a fearless, astute champion of diversity in news media,” wrote Steve Montiel, one of the Institute’s co-founders.
Survivors: her partner, Jay T. Harris; two sons, David and Alex Maynard; a step-daughter, Dori Maynard; a sister; and a brother.
