Rowan was born August 11, 1925, in the mining town of Ravenscroft, Tennessee.  When he was a baby his family moved to McMinnville, Tennessee, because his parents thought its lumberyards offered more opportunity. His father, Thomas, stacked lumber for construction, and his mother, Johnnie, cleaned houses, cooked, and did laundry for wealthier families. They had five children. The Rowan family home had no electricity, running water, telephone, nor even a clock. One of young Carls teachers encouraged him to read and write as much as possible, even going to the library for him because, as a black person, Rowan wasnt allowed to check out books for himself. He graduated at the top of his high school class.

Rowan worked at a tuberculosis hospital and saved money to start his undergraduate studies at Tennessee State College in 1942. After the U.S. entered World War II, Rowan signed up for a Navy program that led to an officers commission. He was one of the first twenty black Naval officers during World War II, serving on a tanker in the Atlantic Ocean.

Rowan finished Oberlin College in Ohio in 1947, and earned a masters degree in journalism at the University of Minnesota in 1948. That year, Rowan got his first journalism job as a copy editor at the Minneapolis Tribune. Within six years he was reporting for the paper in the southern U.S. to cover response to the Supreme Court desegregation ruling. His foreign correspondence covered the war over the Suez Canal in 1956, and events in Europe and Asia.  

Rowans reporting caught the eye of Lyndon Johnson, and led to an appointment in the State Department of the John F. Kennedy administration in 1961. Rowan then served as a delegate to the United Nations, an ambassador to Finland, and Director of the U.S. Information Agency.

Rowan left the Federal government in 1965 to start a syndicated newspaper column.  It was published three days a week until his death in 2000. He also produced radio commentaries that aired five days a week.  Rowan was a regular television