Carl Rowan

Carl Thomas Rowan was born on the eleventh of August, 1925, at Ravenscroft, Tennessee, one of five children of Thomas David Rowan, a Black man who stacked lumber for a meager wage, and Johnnie Bradford Rowan. He came of age in the hard soil of the segregated South, yet carried from it a hunger for learning that would define the whole arc of his life.

He studied at Tennessee State University and Washburn University, served as one of the first Black officers commissioned in the United States Navy during the Second World War, then earned a degree at Oberlin College and a master's in journalism at the University of Minnesota. In 1950 he became one of the first Black reporters at the Minneapolis Tribune, where his dispatches on the segregated South and the rising Civil Rights Movement won national notice and a rare standing for a Black journalist of his day.

Called into public service, Rowan served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State, then as United States Ambassador to Finland from 1963 to 1964. In 1964 President Lyndon B. Johnson named him Director of the United States Information Agency, a post he held until 1965 — making him the first African American to sit on the National Security Council and, at the time, the highest-ranking Black official in the federal government.

For decades thereafter his syndicated column and broadcast commentary carried a fearless, principled voice into millions of homes. Carl Rowan died on the twenty-third of September, 2000, in Washington, D.C. May the honored memory of this pathfinder — reporter, diplomat, and truth-teller — stand undimmed.