After Minnesota years, journalist Carl Rowan became diplomatic pioneer

Carl Rowan grew up the oldest of five siblings in Tennessee during the Great Depression, in a house without electricity, running water or even toothbrushes.

He went on to become one of the first Black commissioned officers in the U.S. Navy, parlaying the GI Bill to attend Oberlin College in Ohio before earning a graduate degree in journalism from the University of Minnesota and joining the Minneapolis Tribune in 1948. He rose from there to become one of the country's most prominent journalists of color and a high-ranking diplomat with the U.S. State Department under presidents John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson.

"In a lot of ways he was a small-town kid from Tennessee," attorney Carl Rowan Jr. said when his father died in 2000, "and every day he got up he was surprised by how far he had come."

Rowan was probably never more surprised than when he found himself in a late-winter sauna in Virginia, Minn., in 1963. Then 37, he'd been tapped by Kennedy to serve as the U.S. ambassador to Finland. Iron Range Finns invited him to sweat with them "to see if you can take it, if you're fit for Finland," as one of the organizers said.

When someone in the sauna tossed a ladle of cold water on the hot rocks, a perspiring Rowan quipped: "If you're going to throw anything on those rocks, make it bourbon." He joked that he enjoyed his sauna indoctrination so much that he was "going to have another next year."

Rowan's improbable rise from poverty to international diplomacy is the focus of a PBS documentary premiering Feb. 15. Called "The American Diplomat," the hourlong show features Rowan as one of three African-American ambassadors who "would challenge the foundations of American diplomacy and try to change the way America represented itself to the world."

Rowan recounts a 1951 meeting with Tribune editors, when he suggested "that we had a responsibility to tell the people of this state something about the Negro citizens of this nation." His ensuing 18-part series — "How Far From Slavery?" — became "a sensation and made Rowan's career," according to the PBS program.

By New Year's Day in 1961, Rowan had become so well known that Kennedy's aides woke him up in Pasadena, Calif., where he had gone to watch his Golden Gophers battle the University of Washington Huskies in the Rose Bowl.

Impressed by Rowan's campaign coverage, the president-elect had decided to name the Minneapolis journalist deputy assistant secretary of state for public affairs. Rowan "would communicate Kennedy's policies to journalists around the world," according to "The American Diplomat."

When he became an ambassador two years later, he wrote that he "could belie the notion that my country was hopelessly racist." A decade earlier, while on a lecture tour for the State Department, Rowan had been introduced as an "excellent propagandist for America" who couldn't truly experience freedom back home.

"I was not a State Department lackey," Rowan later wrote. "I simply [said] good things about my country because I believe that the society that had given me a break was in the process of taking great strides toward racial justice."

He later said that his tenure in Finland "would hasten the day when American Negroes are playing the role they ought to play in our foreign service."

After JFK's assassination, President Johnson appointed Rowan director of the U.S. Information Agency to succeed Edward R. Murrow. "It was Rowan's job to protect America's image overseas," the PBS show says, though it often put him at odds with the civil rights unrest back home.

But his decision to jump into government service didn't surprise his son Jeffrey, according to the PBS documentary: "He wanted his voice to be heard. He wanted a seat at the table in both domestic and international policy making."

When Rowan visited Virginia, Minn., for that sauna in 1963, he spoke to 400 high school and junior college students. He challenged them to "shake off the yoke of that despot, custom" because "man is still dogged by the notion that one group of people is destined to make all the decisions and the others are destined to obey."

Rowan returned to journalism in 1966 as a nationally syndicated columnist and frequent commentator on public affairs programs. He wrote several books, including a 1991 memoir titled "Breaking Barriers," and kept writing and speaking until September 2000, when he died at 75 with heart disease and diabetes.

"Carl Rowan was a poor, Black country kid from Tennessee who said 'no' to the status quo there, across the U.S.A. and around the world," USA Today founder Allen Neuharth said when Rowan died.

Washington Post columnist William Raspberry nodded to Rowan's Minneapolis years: "He was for Black journalists among the very pioneers in the business. He did it early and he did it well."

Curt Brown's tales about Minnesota's history appear each Sunday. Readers can send him ideas and suggestions at mnhistory@startribune.com. His latest book looks at 1918 Minnesota, when flu, war and fires converged: strib.mn/MN1918.