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Rowan, Carl Thomas
American journalist, head of United States Information Agency.Carl Thomas Rowan was born in Ravenscroft, Tennessee. After serving as an officer in the U.S. Navy, which was segregated at the time, Rowan began a career as a newspaper journalist at the white-owned Minneapolis Tribune. One of the first African American reporters for a large urban daily newspaper, Rowan captured the racial struggles of the 1950s with a series on discrimination in the South and an article on the landmark segregation case before the U.S. Supreme Court—Brown v. Board of Education.In 1961 Rowan entered government service as deputy assistant secretary of state to President John F. Kennedy. Appointed ambassador to Finland in 1963, he was one of the first African Americans diplomats to serve in a predominantly white nation. That same year he became head of the United States Information Agency (USIA), the highest post in the government's executive branch that an African American had yet held. Rowan remained visible with a nationally syndicated newspaper column, which he continued to write until a few days before his death, as well as radio and television broadcasts. Rowan, whose writings tend to support mainstream liberal politics, drew criticism from both conservatives and radical black nationalists. In 1987 Rowan founded Project Excellence, a program to raise scholarship money for black students around the nation's capital.Sign up to recieve email alerts from African American Studies Center
