Rowan, Carl Thomas (1925–2000)

Carl Thomas Rowan was a prominent American journalist, author, and government official. A liberal commentator and champion for civil rights, Rowan published books and a variety of news columns syndicated across the US. He was one of the first commissioned black officers in the US Navy, and became the highest-ranking black government official of his time.

Born on August 11, 1925, to Thomas David and Johnnie Bradford Rowan, in Ravenscroft, Tennessee, Carl Rowan grew up in McMinnville, Tennessee. Like many Southern black youths in the Jim Crow segregated South, Rowan worked menial jobs for the white community and experienced constant racial discrimination.

Rowan graduated from McMinnville’s all-black Bernard High School in 1942, as class president and valedictorian. He briefly worked in a tuberculosis hospital before enrolling in the all-black Tennessee Agricultural and Industrial State College (later renamed Tennessee State University) in the fall of 1942. In his freshman year, Rowan passed an exam for the US Navy commission, and became one of the first fifteen African Americans in the history of the US Navy to become a commissioned officer in 1944.

Rowen left the Navy in 1946. Thanks to the GI Bill of Rights, he was able to enroll in Oberlin College and receive a bachelor's degree in mathematics in 1947. He went on to earn a master’s degree in journalism from the University of Minnesota in 1948. While in school, he wrote for a number of African American newspapers, including the Baltimore Afro-American, the Minneapolis Spokesman, and the St. Paul Recorder. After graduation, Rowen beat all odds to get hired as a copy editor at the then-all-white Minneapolis Tribune (later, after a merger, renamed the Star-Tribune). He became the paper’s first black general assignment reporter in 1950, one of the first few nationwide. In 1952, he published his first book, South of Freedom, depicting the African American experience in the Jim Crow segregated South.

During his tenure at the Minneapolis Tribune, Rowen was assigned to cover the civil rights battles in the South. His article series on the court cases leading up to the landmark “Brown vs. Board of Education” Supreme Court ruling against segregation in public schools won him the prestigious Sigma Delta Chi Journalism Award for the best general reporting in 1954. He went on to win this award for an unprecedented three consecutive years.

In 1954, Rowan was invited to participate in an educational exchange program sponsored by the US Department of State, delivering lectures on the role of a free press in a democratic society in India, Pakistan, and Southeast Asia. In 1961 he left the Tribune for Washington, DC, to serve as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs with the US Department of State (1961–63) in the administration of John F. Kennedy. He was thirty-six years old. He went on to serve as ambassador to Finland (1963–64) and Director of the United States Information Agency (1964–65) in the Johnson administration, which in 1964 made him the highest-ranking black American in the US government.

As director of the USIA, Rowan was tasked to aid the US war effort in Vietnam, which attracted some criticism. In 1965, Rowan resigned from the USIA and took a lucrative offer writing a national column for the Chicago Sun-Times Syndicate (also known as the Field Newspaper Service Syndicate) that was syndicated to sixty newspapers across the nation. He also did radio commentaries three times a week. Race was a prominent theme of his columns and commentaries. His autobiography, Breaking Barriers, came out in 1991.

An advocate for strict handgun control laws, Rowan found himself in the center of controversy when he shot and wounded a teenage intruder in his home, using an unregistered firearm. He was arrested and tried, but the jury deadlocked and the case was declared a mistrial.

In 1999 Rowan retired from his position as a syndicated columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times. He passed away on September 24, 2000, in Washington, DC. In his obituary, the New York Times called Rowan “the crusading journalist, best-selling author and defender of affirmative action.”