A Defiant Voice : Carl Rowan has been accused of trying to destroy the NAACP. But the columnist says : he is only after change.

If you’ve ever heard that soothing voice or read those scholarly sentences, you’d know it’s him. Syndicated columnist Carl Rowan has a signature style.

That jowly baby face and genial manner have been fixtures among the talking heads on PBS’ “Inside Washington” since 1965. His voice can be heard on 25 major-market radio stations broadcasting “The Rowan Reports,” a daily radio commentary. He has written seven books, some of them bestsellers.

But lately, Rowan, an elegant and polished black man of 69 years who writes and speaks in the terse and precise prose common among the well-educated of his generation, has become something of an attack journalist on a self-appointed mission to bring down the current leadership of the NAACP.

His bitterly critical columns, distributed by the King Features Syndicate and published in 100 newspapers across the land, are the major reason the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People is facing its greatest crisis. NAACP Executive Director Benjamin F. Chavis was forced to resign late in the summer amid allegations first raised by Rowan--that he used the organization’s money to settle a sexual discrimination suit brought by a former employee, opening the organization’s financial practices to unprecedented public scrutiny.

Rowan’s current target is NAACP Board Chairman William Gibson, who had been Chavis’ most ardent supporter. By repeatedly demanding that Gibson resign, Rowan has set himself apart from most mainstream reporters--black or white--who tend to steer clear of pointed and determined criticism of the NAACP. But Rowan relishes the combat of writing to incite change--regardless, he said, of whether his targets are white-led government institutions, such as the FBI under former director J. Edgar Hoover in the 1960s, or the current NAACP leadership.

During a wide-ranging interview conducted recently in the living room of his rambling northwest Washington home, Rowan defended his hard-edged columns. He called them “a service,” written with the intention of educating the public and instigating reforms within an organization he views as necessary to the interests of African Americans.

Rowan rejected the argument that he is bent on destroying the NAACP. In fact, he says, the organization absolutely has a role in the post-civil rights generation. “Take this (recent mid-term) election. The NAACP in a good and normal time would have been out there for weeks trying to get blacks out to vote,” he said. “They have been virtually paralyzed by all their money troubles and could only do a little trifling stuff.”

Once Gibson is out of office, Rowan said, and a new management team is in place, he will use his column to urge supporters to send money back into the NAACP.

“There is a group preparing for the moment when (Gibson) steps down so they can say to the nation, as I will say, ‘The time has come to rush to the rescue to the support of this organization because the United States would be a lesser place without an NAACP,’ ” Rowan said. “But no way will I ask anybody to give a nickel as long as (Gibson) is there at the head of the NAACP because I know the extent to which the meager funds of the NAACP have been abused.”

Rowan also brushed aside suggestions he was an “Uncle Tom” or tool of the mainstream media, noting his 43 years as a Life Member of the NAACP. Among the highlights: Rowan “worked closely with (then NAACP attorney) Thurgood Marshall in the days way before Brown v. Board of Education.”

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For much of his life, Rowan has been defiantly confronting conventions of the day. He was one of the nation’s first blacks to be a commissioned officer in the U.S. Navy, which enabled him to graduate from Oberlin College and to earn a master’s degree in journalism from the University of Minnesota on the G.I. Bill.

He worked briefly at the Baltimore Afro-American, a black-owned newspaper, but left to become a copy editor at the Minneapolis Tribune and one of the few blacks working within the white press in the late 1940s. His reporting on race relations in the segregated South during the 1950s brought him fame and recognition, as well as close associations with such civil rights leaders as former NAACP General Secretary Roy Wilkins, Urban League President Whitney Young and Marshall.

In 1961, seeking to integrate the all-white diplomatic corps, President John F. Kennedy appointed Rowan to be deputy secretary of state. Later, Kennedy tapped him as a U.N. delegate during the Cuban missile crisis and ambassador to Finland.

During the Lyndon Johnson Administration, Rowan sat in on Cabinet and National Security Council meetings as director of the United States Information Agency. In that capacity, Rowan was privy to secret FBI documents on the activities of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., an issue that some within the NAACP have pointed to as proof of Rowan’s cozy ties to Hoover and his passion for attacking the civil rights leadership.

“That’s just hogwash,” Rowan said. “Everybody in the world knows J. Edgar Hoover hated my guts and he made it known with a passion.”

In his 1991 autobiography, “Breaking Barriers,” Rowan made it clear he felt the same about Hoover. “The FBI director had turned his powerful agency into a ruthless foe of blacks and the civil rights movement because Hoover hated the idea of black equality and because King had dared to criticize him,” Rowan wrote. “I knew that Hoover’s hatred of this most articulate, most inspiring of all the civil rights leaders, and King’s apparent vulnerability to Hoover’s assaults, jeopardized not just my USIA budget but the whole campaign for civil rights and black equality.”

When asked about his relationship with Hoover and King, Rowan admitted to having “one disagreement” with King concerning the minister’s sermons against the Vietnam War, which angered Johnson. “We were close friends,” he said of King. “I tried to warn him about the things Hoover and the FBI were doing. President Johnson gave me permission to inform King about wiretaps and smear tactics used by Hoover, and I tried to persuade King to watch what he did and with whom he did it.”

Rowan said his fight with Gibson and the NAACP board pale in comparison to his battles with Hoover. “The Hoover business was more vociferous than this,” he said. “But I felt just as secure then as I do now because I know what I’m writing is right and eventually it will all come out in the public.”

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But why is Carl Rowan airing the NAACP’s dirty linen now?

“The time comes when you know that silence in the face of arrogant destruction makes you guilty to a great degree,” Rowan said. “I have no agenda whatsoever for picking the next director or board chairman. But I do know they have got to reconstruct the board.”

So far, he’s won one battle toward that goal.

In an 801-word column released by the syndicate on Aug. 8, Rowan fired his opening shot. He wrote that he possessed documents suggesting an “adulterous relationship” between Chavis and a former employee, Mary E. Stansel. He also alleged the former executive director “used at least $64,000 of NAACP funds as initial ‘hush’ payments” to prevent her from filing suit against him and the NAACP.

That column scored a direct hit. Across the nation, in small towns and major urban areas, fax machines and grapevine gossip spewed word of Rowan’s columns among NAACP members and supporters. Major newspapers such as the New York Times, the Baltimore Sun, the Wall Street Journal and the Los Angeles Times noticed as well, initiating their own probes into the NAACP’s administrative and financial problems.

Rowan said he often sees his work slightly reworked or reproduced in newspapers without his byline. “That’s all right because it’s the service I’m providing,” he said. “As far as I’m concerned that’s a part of the job of getting the major media to focus on some of the things they would not necessarily focus on.”

Soon, the NAACP’s troubles became a well-worked story. People were talking about Chavis’ secret $332,000 settlement of a sexual harassment charge, about the NAACP’s debts that were soaring into the millions of dollars. By late August, Chavis was history, forced out by the board of directors and bitterly complaining of unfair media attacks on his administration.

In the weeks following Chavis’ firing, Rowan continued to pound away in this columns at Gibson. Citing unnamed sources and secretly obtained documents, Rowan wrote that Gibson “doubled dipped” thousands of dollars in expense reimbursements from the organization and used his NAACP-provided American Express card to live an elaborate lifestyle relative to most members of the civil rights group.

Gibson, a Greenville, S.C., dentist, has denied Rowan’s accusations.

Appearing last month at an NAACP South Carolina State Convention assembly in Florence, Gibson branded Rowan a “Judas Iscariot” and a “house nigger” to shouts of affirmation and support.

“No, that doesn’t bother me,” Rowan said, when asked about Gibson’s comments. “I don’t believe even a fraction of the blacks in this nation believe that. I’ve heard that all my professional life. My job is to tell the public things I think they ought to know and don’t already know. If I see an injustice to African Americans, I feel it is my duty to tell the public about it. I make no apologies about that.”

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Without question, Rowan has shaken public confidence in the NAACP’s leadership, rattling its support, from the grass roots to its contributing foundations to its embattled executive suites. Grants from private corporations and philanthropic organizations have been curtailed pending an independent investigation into the NAACP’s financial affairs. Money from local and state branches has stopped flowing into the national headquarters, forcing officials to furlough about 90 employees.

Rowan said many of his sources have come to him after reading his columns in the State newspaper in Columbia, S.C., and the Baltimore Sun (Baltimore is home to the NAACP’s national headquarters). Those papers have been important in generating new sources because NAACP members--with knowledge of Gibson’s activities in South Carolina and headquarters operations--fax Rowan’s stories to others across the nation and information to him.

“There is quite a network going on out there,” Rowan said. “When members start asking questions, more and more people call me with information.”

To prove his point, he rose from his living room chair to answer the telephone in another part of the house and returned a few minutes later, snaking fax paper behind him.

“This is from the State newspaper in Columbia, S.C.,” he said. “The State has written an editorial calling for Gibson to resign.”

The largest newspaper in South Carolina had a lead editorial titled: “For the sake of the NAACP, Chairman Gibson must go.” The editorial read: “Columnist Carl Rowan’s accusations . . . is but one reason for his dismissal.”

Thomas N. McLean, editorial page editor at the State, said he has published every one of Rowan’s seven columns attacking the NAACP since last summer. “I think Mr. Rowan’s reporting is the basis of our decision here. . . . There wasn’t much debate. Mr. Rowan’s work has been pretty through and devastating.”

Similarly, the Baltimore Sun has run every one of Rowan’s columns. But Barry Rascovar, editorial page director at the Sun, said the newspaper stopped short of calling for Gibson’s resignation.

“We don’t want to be accused of trying to lop off the heads of every NAACP leader,” Rascovar said. But, he added, “Carl Rowan is a known black columnist and the fact that he was reporting rather than columnizing gave him incredible credibility. A white columnist wouldn’t have been given as much credibility.”

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For some critics of his work, however, Rowan’s columns have no credibility.

“I think Carl Rowan is an absolute disgrace to the African American race,” said Larry Carter, an NAACP board member from Des Moines, Iowa. “It seems like he’s trying to take a short crawl back to the plantation. He’s done the African American community an injustice.”

Kelly Alexander Jr., who directs the NAACP’s North Carolina State Conference and supports Gibson’s leadership, said Rowan’s columns create a buzz among NAACP members and reporters often before he has an opportunity to read them.

“He stirred the pot,” Alexander said bitterly. “Every time the issues he raised came down from boiling to a simmer, he stirs the pot again so it comes to a boil again.”

Hemphill Pride II, an attorney and former president of the NAACP branch in Columbia, S.C., is one of Rowan’s supporters:

“Carl Rowan appears to be outraged about the shenanigans that have occurred at the NAACP under the watch of this generation of leaders.”

Pride, a Life Member of the NAACP who is also filing legal challenges to obtain the financial records of the S.C. NAACP branches controlled by Gibson, said it took courage for Rowan to write about the NAACP in a critical fashion.

“No one likes to criticize the NAACP because of the long and successful history of the organization,” he said. “It’s uncomfortable to air dirty laundry in public. But that’s a sword that cuts both ways because if black leadership fails to be kept accountable, a lot of people will be taken advantage of in the process.”

That’s how Rowan sees it too. He said his columns provide a sense of empowerment to the rank-and-file membership of the NAACP to demand accountability from their leaders, even if it breaches the myth of maintaining racial solidarity.

“Previously, black America hadn’t paid much attention” to the inner workings of the NAACP and its board, Rowan said. “They didn’t really know what was going on. I’m not the protector of anything. Eventually, I have to write the truth.”