The Press: Return of the Native

Young Carl Rowan has done well since he left his home town of McMinnville, Tenn. eight years ago. He won a Navy V12 scholarship, got one of the few Navy commissions given to Negroes, took a master’s degree at the University of Minnesota and went to work as a reporter for the Minneapolis morning Tribune (circ. 185,500). Two months ago, Newshawk Rowan persuaded his editor to let him make a 6,000-mile tour by bus, train and rented cars of 13 Southern states for a series of stories. Last week, the Tribune began front-paging a perceptive, well-written series on segregation and prejudice in the South as only a Negro could know them.

Knowing the Rules. Rowan started his tour at McMinnville (pop. 7,599), and found it little changed. The drugstore would still not serve him water in a glass, gave him a paper cup. Negro schoolchildren could still get books from the public library only by sending their teacher for them. But there were a few differences. Amid the shanties of “Niggertown” were rows of neat new houses which Negro veterans had built, with federal aid.

By knowing what rules he had to obey, Rowan managed to stay out of trouble. He dressed well in Tennessee, knowing that good clothes bring a Negro better treatment that far north. But when he got to some of the small towns in the Deep South, he changed to rough clothes. Says Rowan: “I knew if I didn’t, they would think I was uppity.”

He forgot himself only once. In Macon, Ga., unable to buy a newspaper in the colored waiting room, he crossed over to the white side to get one. The agent, cursing, ran out to warn him back—and Rowan returned his curses. When the agent ran to the telephone, Rowan, fearing that there might be trouble, fled from town by taxicab.

Chipping the Barrier. Although he found the old race barriers still in existence, Reporter Rowan also found that they are being chipped away. On Atlantic Coast Line’s Palmetto, between Washington and Charleston, where five years ago Ensign Rowan, U.S.N.R. had to eat at a curtain-rigged table, Newsman Rowan ate in an open diner—thanks to the Supreme Court decision outlawing Jim Crow in dining cars on interstate trains. In New Orleans, by showing his Naval Reserve card, he even got a Pullman berth.

Often, Southerners, wary of offending a dark-skinned man who might turn out to be a United Nations diplomat, would ask: “Are you colored?” Angrily, Rowan would retort: “Can’t you see I’m colored? What you mean is, am I an American? Yes, I am an American.” Thus assured, they would make him keep to the color line.

But Rowan met white Southerners who were fighting race bias. An editor told him: “White supremacists are not thinking people.” A businessman, whose parents had taught him race prejudice, said: “My children won’t be that way.”

In Kentucky, Rowan found Negroes attending universities with whites, and though some students protested, their professors approved. Concluded Rowan: “A dying generation of the Old South will not give [segregation] up without bitterness. A misled portion of the new generation will not relinquish segregation without a battle . . . But it is evident that soon—very soon—segregation will vanish.”