Syndicated Columnist Dead At Age 75

Carl Rowan, a well-known commentator and nationally syndicated newspaper columnist who was once called America's "most visible black journalist," died Saturday. He was 75.

LeRoy Tillman, a spokesman for Washington Hospital Center, said Rowan died at about 3 a.m. of natural causes in the hospital's Intensive Care Unit.

Rowan, he said, "was in and out of the hospital for various illness for the past few weeks."

During his career 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."

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.

He has 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.

Newsday columnist Les Payne remembers Rowan as a journalist who prided himself in commenting on a wide variety of issues, and not as a black voice.

"He saw himself as an American who happened to be black, and by virtue of that, he was able to deal with issues that were specific to the black condition. But beyond that, he also saw himself as a broad-based journalist; he did not at all see himself as the voice of black America."

Payne found a rare contradiction in Rowan's life. He noted that Rown once shot and wounded an intruder in his Washington D.C. home and that he was really an opponent of gun control while he acted as an advocate for gun control.

Nonetheless, Payne says Rowan was even quoted overseas at key points: "When Martin Luther King died, when Malcolm X died. He was kind of the voice, in some ways, not just of black Americans, but of Americans in overseas outlets."

Rowan 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.

His three-times-a-week column was nationally syndicated by King Features.

On television, Rowan was a panelist on "Inside Washington" from 1967 to 1996.

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