Carl Rowan

Carl Thomas Rowan was born on the eleventh of August 1925 at Ravenscroft, Tennessee, the second of five children of Thomas David Rowan — a Black saw-mill worker of the East Tennessee timber-belt — and Johnnie Bradford Rowan, a domestic. The family moved to McMinnville, Tennessee in 1928, and Rowan was raised in the Black-McMinnville household of his father.

He was placed at the Bernard High School at McMinnville and took the bachelor’s at the Oberlin College in 1947 — among the first Black graduates of the institution after the war. He served the United States Navy at the closing months of the Second World War in 1945 and 1946 as a communications officer — among the first sixteen Black naval officers commissioned by the Navy.

He took the master of arts in journalism at the University of Minnesota in 1948 and was hired in 1948 by the Minneapolis Tribune as a copy editor — one of the first Black reporters at a major American daily newspaper. He rose at the Tribune to general-assignment reporter by 1950 and to Asian-and-African correspondent by 1955.

He wrote across the closing years of the 1950s the principal Tribune international-correspondence portfolio — predominantly the post-Bandung Conference Asian and African coverage. He won the 1954, 1955 and 1956 Sigma Delta Chi Journalism Society awards — the first African American three-time winner of the Sigma Delta Chi awards.

He was nominated by President John F. Kennedy on the twenty-eighth of February 1961 as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs and was confirmed by the Senate on the second of March 1961.

He was nominated by President Kennedy on the seventh of February 1963 as Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the United States to the Republic of Finland and was confirmed by the Senate on the eighth of February 1963. He presented his credentials at Helsinki on the seventeenth of April 1963. He was the second-youngest American ambassador to any government at the time of the appointment, and the principal United States diplomatic representative in the Soviet-bloc neutral states of the period.

He was named on the twenty-first of January 1964 by President Lyndon Johnson the Director of the United States Information Agency — the principal post-war United States international-broadcasting-and-information-warfare agency of the post-war period. He served the United States Information Agency directorship from February 1964 to July 1965 — the first African American director of the Agency and the first African American on the United States National Security Council during the Agency’s sixteen-month period.

He resigned the United States Information Agency directorship in July 1965 to take the principal Black-American newspaper columnist position of the period — the syndicated column for the Field Newspaper Syndicate at Chicago. He wrote the syndicated column for the next thirty-three years across over two hundred newspapers and four hundred million readers per week at peak circulation.

He published in 1991 the principal Black-American autobiographical political journalism of the period — Breaking Barriers: A Memoir at Little, Brown — and the principal Thurgood Marshall biography of the period — Dream Makers, Dream Breakers: The World of Justice Thurgood Marshall (1993).

He died at Washington, D.C. on the twenty-third of September 2000 of complications of diabetes-related illness, at seventy-five.

He is honored here as the first Black member of the National Security Council.