Rowan, Carl T. 1925—

Carl T. Rowan 1925—

Journalist

At a Glance…

Began Journalism Career

Covered Montgomery Bus Boycott

Joined Kennedy Administration

Return to Journalism

Selected writings

Sources

Familiar to Americans as a nationally-syndicated columnist and a panelist on the television program Inside Washington, Carl T. Rowan has been called by the Washington Post “the most visible black journalist in the country.” In his long and distinguished career in journalism, and as the author of six books, Rowan has documented some of the biggest political and social stories of the last fifty years, including the Cold War, the American Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War, and the economic policies of the Reagan administration. He has also held government posts in the Kennedy and Johnson presidential administrations, serving as director of the United States Information Agency and U.S. Ambassador to Finland. Rowan’s 1991 bestselling autobiography, Breaking Barriers: A Memoir, recounts his ground-breaking career as one of the nation’s few black journalists, from his early days in poverty, to his becoming one of the first black officers in the U.S. Navy, one of the first black reporters on a U.S. national daily newspaper, his tenure as the highest-ranking black official in the federal government, and his often outspoken career as a nationally-syndicated columnist.

Rowan grew up in poverty in McMinnville, Tennessee, in the midst of the segregated “Jim Crow” South, where his father struggled to support his family on a meager salary stacking lumber, and his mother occasionally took in laundry. Like many black youths, Rowan did various menial jobs for the white community, and while the economic and social situation in McMinnville offered little hope for the future, Rowan found an outlet in education. Particularly important to him were teachers who stressed the values of education and persistence as the way to confront the obstacles facing him as a black youth. One high school teacher in particular, “Miss Bessie,” to whom Rowan dedicated a 1980 column, smuggled him books out of the all-white library in McMinnville. Rowan recounted the important message imparted to him by Miss Bessie in Breaking Barriers: “If you don’t read, you can’t write, and if you can’t write, you can stop dreaming.”

Rowan excelled as a student at McMinnville’s all-black Bernard High School, where he graduated as valedictorian of his class. After graduation, Rowan headed for Nashville with only 77 cents to his name but hopes of attending college. He moved in with his grandparents and worked as an attendant at the hospital where his

At a Glance…

Full name, Carl Thomas Rowan; born August 11, 1925, in Ravenscroft, TN; son of Thomas David and Johannie (Bradford) Rowan; married Vivien Louise Murphy, August 2, 1950; children: Barbara, Carl Thomas, Jr., Geoffrey. Education: Attended Tennessee State University, 1942-43, and Washburn University, 1943-44; Oberlin College, A.B. (mathematics), 1947; University of Minnesota, M.A. (journalism), 1948.

Minneapolis Tribune, copy editor, 1948-50, staff reporter, 1950-61; U.S. Department of State, deputy assistant secretary for public affairs, 1961-63; U.S. Ambassador to Finland, 1963-64; director of United States Information Agency, 1964-65; Chicago Daily News, columnist for Field Newspaper Syndicate, 1965—. National affairs commentator, The Rowan Report (national radio program); political commentator for radio and television stations of Post-Newsweek Broadcasting Co.; panelist, Agronsky & Co. and Inside Washington (syndicated television shows); frequent panelist, Meet the Press, NBC-TV. Former member of U.S. delegation to United Nations. Lecturer. Military service: U.S. Navy, communications officer.

Awards: Sidney Hillman Award, 1952, for best newspaper reporting; “Best Book” citations, American Library Association, 1953, for South of Freedom, and 1956, for The Pitiful and the Proud; Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith communications award, 1964; named “Washington Journalist of the Year,” Capital Press Club, 1978; American Black Achievement Award, Ebony, 1978; George Foster Peabody Award, 1978, for Race War in Rhodesia; Alfred I. DuPont-Columbia University Silver Baton, 1987, for television documentary Thurgood Marshall: The Man.

Addresses: Home —Washington, DC. Office —1101 7th St. N.W., Washington, DC 20036.

grandfather was employed, earning $30 a month for his college expenses. He enrolled at all-black Tennessee State University in 1942, and the following year was recommended by a professor for an opportunity to take an examination for a U.S. Navy commission. Rowan passed the examination, and was later assigned to Washburn University in Topeka, Kansas, as one of the first fifteen blacks in Navy history to be admitted to the V-12 officer-training program. Rowan later attended Oberlin College in Ohio as part of the program, and then the Naval Reserve Midshipmen School in Fort Schuyler, the Bronx. He was eventually commissioned an officer and was assigned to sea duty, where he excelled as deputy commander of the communications division.

Rowan’s naval duties ended in 1946 and he briefly returned to McMinnville, but his time in the Navy had pointed him towards new goals in his life. “When you are plucked out of a totally Jim Crow environment at age seventeen and thrown into a totally white environment where more is at stake than your personal life, you mature rapidly,” he wrote in Breaking Barriers.

Rowan returned to Oberlin to complete his college degree, with hopes of eventually becoming a journalist. He found Oberlin’s “egalitarianism” a positive experience, and learned much from students who, unlike himself, “came from homes where political, economic, and social issues were discussed daily.” Rowan majored in mathematics, and obtained work as a free-lance writer for the Negro newspaper chain, the Baltimore Afro-American. When he was accepted into graduate school in journalism at the University of Minnesota, Rowan worked as a northern correspondent for the Afro-American, and also wrote for the Twin Cities’ two black papers, the Minneapolis Spokesman and the St. Paul Recorder.

Began Journalism Career

Rowan got a big break after graduate school when he was hired at the copy desk of the all-white Minneapolis Tribune. Two years later, he became that paper’s first black reporter, and one of the few in the entire United States. Rowan was working as a general-assignment reporter when he remembered the advice of a white Texan he had met in the Navy who told him that if he became a writer, he should “tell all the little things it means to be a Negro in the South, or anyplace where being a Negro makes a difference.” Rowan proposed to the Tribune management that he take a trip through the deep South and report on the effects of Jim Crow discrimination laws on Negroes. The Tribune enthusiastically agreed to Rowan’s proposal, and he embarked upon a 6,000-mile journey through thirteen states, writing a series of eighteen articles in 1951 entitled, “How Far From Slavery?”

Rowan’s articles caused a sensation among Tribune readers and brought him wide critical recognition, in addition to earning him the Sidney Hillman Award for the best newspaper reporting of 1952. Time magazine praised the articles as “a perceptive, well-written series on segregation and prejudice in the South as only a Negro could know them.” Rowan noted in Breaking Barriers, his objective was “to tell the American people some truths they do not know, explain some things that they clearly do not understand, and … fulfill every journalistic obligation that burdens any reporter of any race.” The articles also became the basis for Rowan’s first book, South of Freedom, published in 1952.

Hodding Carter, white editor of a liberal Mississippi newspaper (and father of State Department spokesperson Hodding Carter, Jr.), wrote in the New York Times that South of Freedom was “a vivid reminder that changes which a white Southerner thinks are swift seem snail-like and indecisive to a southerner who is not white and who suffers from color barriers” and called the book “a noteworthy contribution to the sad folklore of American interracial relations.” Reviewer Harold Fleming in the New Republic noted that Rowan’s “return to the South was a profound personal experience, and he communicates that experience to the reader with unusual skill.”

Rowan returned to the South for a second series of articles entitled “Jim Crow’s Last Stand,” which reviewed the various court cases comprising the historic 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka Supreme Court decision, outlawing racial segregation in public schools. Rowan gained further recognition with “Jim Crow’s Last Stand,” and in 1954 received the prestigious Sigma Delta Chi Journalism Award for the best general reporting of 1953, in addition to being named by the U.S. Junior Chamber of Commerce as one of America’s ten most outstanding men of 1953.

In 1954, Rowan was invited by the U.S. State Department to travel to India and lecture on the role of a free press in a free society. Rowan wrote a series of articles for the Tribune on India, which earned him his second consecutive Sigma Delta Chi Award, this time for best foreign correspondence. Rowan’s trip was extended to include Southeast Asia, and he wrote another series of articles on the tense political climate in the region, in addition to covering the 1955 Bandung Conference, a gathering of twenty-three underdeveloped nations. For these articles, Rowan won an unprecedented third straight Sigma Delta Chi Award, while his 1956 book, The Pitiful and the Proud, which recounted his Asian journeys, was named one of the best books of the year by the American Library Association.

Covered Montgomery Bus Boycott

Rowan returned to the United States and continued as a reporter for the Tribune. In the late 1950s, he covered the burgeoning Civil Rights Movement in the South, including the historic Montgomery (Alabama) bus boycott in 1955, resulting from Rosa Parks’s refusal to relinquish her bus seat to a white passenger. As the only black reporter covering the story for a national newspaper, Rowan struck a special friendship with the boycott’s leaders, including Martin Luther King, Jr. When news of an unlikely compromise settlement of the boycott came to Rowan’s attention across the Associate Press wire, he notified King, who made quick steps to discredit the story which was about to appear in a Montgomery newspaper, thus ensuring the continuance of the boycott. Rowan wrote an acclaimed series of articles for the Tribune, “Dixie Divided,” which explored efforts in the South to resist the Supreme Court’s desegregation orders.

In addition to his reporting, Rowan was a member of the Committee of 100, a group of citizens who raised money across the United States for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. As one of the country’s few black reporters, Rowan was increasingly called upon to comment upon the impact of the Civil Rights Movement, and his articles appeared throughout the country in a number of magazines and newspapers. His 1957 book, Go South to Sorrow, which generated both controversy and acclaim was, as he describes in Breaking Barriers, a “lashing out at President Eisenhower, Hodding Carter, and other gradualists who, in my view, were compromising away the freedom of America’s black people.”

In 1956, Rowan was called away from the South to cover the United Nations, as the world witnessed two events of major international importance: the Suez Canal crisis in which England, France, and Israel attempted to seize the canal from Egypt, and the Hungarian uprising against the Soviet Union, both in late 1956. Rowan was especially outraged at the brutal Soviet reprisal against the Hungarians, and reflected in Breaking Barriers on its relation to the U.S. Civil Rights Movement: “In the mentalities of our White House, our Congress, our media, there were no ‘troublemakers on both sides’ in Hungary. The villains were the brutal Soviet rapers of innocent Hungarians who had dared to reach out for freedom. But in America the air was filled with cries, even by Eisenhower and Stevenson, for a ‘moderate’ approach to ending segregation and a national rejection of ‘the extremists on both sides.’”

Joined Kennedy Administration

In 1960, Rowan had the opportunity to interview presidential candidates Richard M. Nixon and John F. Kennedy for the Tribune. After Kennedy was elected, the new President contacted Rowan and asked him to become his Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs, responsible for press relations of the State Department. Rowan was involved in the sensitive area of news coverage of increasing U.S. military involvement in Vietnam, and was also trusted to the negotiating team that secured the exchange of pilot Francis Gary Powers, who was shot down over the Soviet Union in his U2 spy plane. He also accompanied Vice-President Lyndon Johnson on a tour through Southeast Asia, India, and Europe. In 1963, Kennedy named Rowan U.S. Ambassador to Finland, making him the youngest ambassador in diplomatic service, and only the fifth black to ever serve as an envoy.

When Johnson became President following Kennedy’s assassination, he named Rowan head of the United States Information Agency (USIA), a position which made him the highest-ranking black in the federal government and the first to ever attend National Security Council meetings. As head of USIA with a staff of 13,000, Rowan was responsible for overseeing a vast government communications network, which included the international Voice of America radio system and the daily communiques to U.S. embassy personnel around the world. Rowan was assigned the task of developing a massive psychological warfare program to assist the Vietnam War effort, and was criticized for drawing away from the other USIA activities. In 1965, Rowan resigned from USIA, and took a lucrative offer to write a national column for the Field Newspaper Syndicate, in addition to three weekly radio commentaries for the Westinghouse Broadcasting Company.

Return to Journalism

As a columnist and commentator on the national scene, Rowan developed a reputation as an independent and often controversial voice on national political and social issues. He publicly urged Martin Luther King, Jr., to remove himself from his increasing anti-war stance, in that it was damaging the thrust of the Civil Rights Movement. He called for the resignation of powerful FBI director, J. Edgar Hoover, holding that Hoover’s lengthy tenure was leading to serious abuses of power, including unethical and illegal investigations of citizens. When Ronald Reagan became president, Rowan became a passionate critic of the President’s policies, noting that the gains made in the Civil Rights Movement for disadvantaged groups were seriously being undermined by cuts in vital social and economic programs.

While Rowan has been throughout the years a frequent spokesman for civil and economic rights for blacks and other disadvantaged groups, he has also been critical of those blacks he feels should more aggressively address the serious issues that affect them. Neil A. Grauer, in his book Wits & Sages, calls Rowan “a vigorous exponent of self-improvement … and has little patience for those who won’t work at it.”

In 1988, Rowan made national headlines when he shot and wounded an intruder in his Washington, DC, home. A frequent advocate of national gun control laws, Rowan was charged with possession of an unregistered firearm, charges which were later dropped in court. Rowan accused former Washington, DC, Mayor Marion Barry—a frequent target of criticism in Rowan’s column—of extortion by offering to not pursue the charges against Rowan if the columnist would tone down attacks on the mayor’s administration. Rowan came under criticism again for speaking out against Barry, yet responded with a statement: “I have learned over four decades as a journalist that ‘City Hall’ becomes more and more corrupt as more and more citizens lose the guts to fight.”

Breaking Barriers, a New York Times bestseller, was praised by Roy Larson in the New York Times Book Review as an “anecdotally rich memoir” which appeals to the “interests of a whole spectrum of readers.” UPI White House correspondent Helen Thomas, on the book’s dust jacket, calls Rowan “one of the most respected and admired journalists on the Washington scene” who “has held the liberal banner high for the disadvantaged and the afflicted.” Throughout his career, Rowan has held the rare position of, as Larson noted, “a prophet with honor on both sides of a biracial society divided against itself.”

Selected writings

South of Freedom, Knopf, 1952.

The Pitiful and the Proud, Random House, 1956.

Go South to Sorrow, Random House, 1957.

Wait Till Next Year: The Life Story of Jackie Robinson, Random House, 1960.

Just between Us Blacks, Random House, 1974.

Race War in Rhodesia, PTV Publications, 1978.

Breaking Barriers: A Memoir, Little, Brown, 1991.

Contributor of articles to numerous periodicals. Contributing editor to Reader’s Digest. Host of documentaries, including Searching for Justice: Three American Stories and Thurgood Marshall: The Man, both 1987.

Sources

Books

Contemporary Issues Criticism, Volume 1, Gale, 1982.

Grauer, Neil A., Wits & Sages, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984.

Rowan, Carl T., Breaking Barriers: A Memoir, Little, Brown, 1991.

Periodicals

Christian Science Monitor, August 4, 1952.

New York Times, August 3, 1952.

New York Times Book Review, January 20, 1991.

Time, June 27, 1988.

Washington Post, October 28, 1978.

—Michael E. Mueller