Rowan, Carl Thomas

Impact on the world

As a reporter for the Minneapolis Tribune in the mid-1950s, Rowan was the only Black journalist covering the Montgomery Bus Boycott for a mainstream national newspaper and developed a personal friendship with Martin Luther King Jr. through that reporting. He went on to serve as U.S. Ambassador to Finland (1963–64) and director of the USIA (1964–65) under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, becoming the first African American to sit on the National Security Council and, at the time, the highest-ranking Black official in U.S. government history. He then wrote a nationally syndicated column, first for the Chicago Sun-Times beginning in 1966 and continuing until 1999, appeared for decades as a panelist on the television program Inside Washington, and founded Project Excellence in 1987, a scholarship program that awarded more than $26 million to Black high-school seniors in the Washington, D.C., area by 2000; he received the NAACP’s Spingarn Medal in 1997.

Life & background

Born August 11, 1925, in Ravenscroft, Tennessee, and raised in poverty in McMinnville during the Great Depression, Rowan graduated valedictorian of his segregated high school in 1942, became one of the first African Americans commissioned as a U.S. Navy officer during World War II, and earned a B.A. from Oberlin College in 1947 and a master’s in journalism from the University of Minnesota in 1948. He worked at the Minneapolis Tribune from 1948 to 1961, becoming one of the first Black reporters at a large urban daily, before entering government service and, from 1965, building a career as a nationally syndicated columnist and broadcast commentator; he died in Washington, D.C., on September 23, 2000, at age 75.

Sources

1. BlackPast.org; MNopedia; EBSCO Research Starters