Journalist, Freedom Forum trustee Carl Rowan dies

The Associated Press

09.23.00

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Carl Thomas Rowan

WASHINGTON — Carl Thomas Rowan, a well-known commentator and nationally syndicated newspaper columnist who was once called America's "most visible black journalist," died today. Rowan, 75, was also a trustee of The Freedom Forum and the First Amendment Center.

LeRoy Tillman, a spokesman for Washington Hospital Center, said Rowan died of natural causes in the hospital's intensive care unit.

During a career that spanned more than a half-century, Rowan had been a frequent guest on public affairs radio and television programs and had served in the administrations of Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson.

"First I see myself simply as a newspaper man and commentator," Rowan told one interviewer. "I inform people and expose them to a point of view they wouldn't get. I work against the racial mind-set of most of the media."

Rowan was born in Ravenscroft, Tenn., a dying coal-mining town, in 1925. He grew up poor during the Great Depression and in his autobiography told of living with "no electricity, no running water, no toothbrushes ... no telephone, no radio and no regular inflow of money."

Still he excelled in school and went on to college. He entered journalism after a stint as one of the first black commissioned officers in the U.S. Navy. He worked as a copy editor at the Minneapolis Tribune.

He returned to the South in the 1950s to report on the Supreme Court's decision requiring school desegregation.

At the time, "no more than five blacks could claim to be general assignment reporters and few were writing anything serious about the American social, political or economic scene," Rowan wrote in his autobiography, Breaking Barriers.

His reporting on race relations led Kennedy to appoint him deputy secretary of state. Before returning to journalism, he also served as a delegate to the United Nations, ambassador to Finland and director of the United States Information Agency.

Rowan made race a recurrent theme in his commentaries and columns, as well as in the college scholarship fund he set up 10 years ago.

After reading about a local high school where black students were embarrassed to stand as their names were called during an honor-roll ceremony, he created Project Excellence to help and encourage black youth to finish school and go on to college.

The program burgeoned, giving away millions in scholarships and teaming up with The Freedom Forum to hand out additional "instant scholarships" worth millions more.

In a Washington Post profile, Rowan was once called "the most visible black journalist in the country."

He is survived by his wife, Vivien. Also surviving are two sons, Carl Rowan Jr., a lawyer; Jeffrey, a clinical psychologist, and one daughter, Barbara, a former journalist.