Carl Rowan

Rowan speaking at a National Security meeting on Vietnam in the Cabinet Room of the White House, July 1965

We must reverse this psychology (of needing guns for home defense). We can do it by passing a law that says anyone found in possession of a handgun except a legitimate officer of the law goes to jail- period!

Carl Rowan (August 11, 1925 - September 23, 2000) columnist and former ambassador.

Quotes

• [President Nixon], in the face of a vote to impeach he might try, as "commander-in-chief", to use military forces to keep himself in power.
  • October 26, 1973 Washington Star article entitled "Has President Nixon Gone Crazy?"

• We must reverse this psychology (of needing guns for home defense). We can do it by passing a law that says anyone found in possession of a handgun except a legitimate officer of the law goes to jail- period!
  • 1981 column.

• David Brinkley: Suppose somebody was breaking into your house at night, and you didn't have a gun. Wouldn't you wish you had one?
  Sam Donaldson: No, I'd call the police immediately, I'd slam the doors, I'd cower under the bed, or in the closet...
  Brinkley: George?
  George Will: I'd call Carl Rowan.
  • exchange on This Week with David Brinkley, June 19, 1988.

• Our country is wallowing in a miasma of political and class conflict, of greed and special interest, with regard to budget deficits, inflation and rising unemployment, the threats of both a bloody war and a devastating recession. How did we get into this mess? Because the press, during the 1980s committed one of the greatest crimes of the 20th century. The media took a dive, caved in, and did not tell the American people the price they would eventually pay for Reaganomics.
  • while accepting the Allen H. Neuharth Award for Excellence in Journalism from the University of South Dakota in 1990.

• Clarence Thomas is the best only at his ability to bootlick for Ronald Reagan and George Bush... They didn't pick him because he was black. They picked him because he's a black conservative. And the thing that bothers me about his appointment -- if they had put David Duke on, I wouldn't scream as much because they would look at David Duke and reject him for what he is. If you gave Clarence Thomas a little flour on his face, you'd think you had David Duke talking.
  • Inside Washington, July 7, 1991.

• You don't really talk about it in terms of the U.N., you talk about it in terms of the United States and the Soviet Union. If you cannot, by diplomacy, bring the Soviet Union into an alliance with the U.S. to stop this situation it is not going to be stopped.
  • Inside Washington, March 6, 1993.

• Don't count out Marian Wright Edelman, because there is talk that President Clinton may want to shock the nation by putting a real black on the Supreme Court.
  • Inside Washington, March 20, 1993.

• Unless Gingrich and Dole and the Republicans say, ‘Am I inflaming a bunch of nuts?’, you know we're going to have some more events (like the Oklahoma City bombing). I am absolutely certain the harsher rhetoric of the Gingriches and the Doles … creates a climate of violence in America.
  • April 25, 1995 Washington Post.

"The Coming Race War in America: A Wake-up Call" (1996)

• A lot of the blood of America's race war victims will be on the hands and bloated bodies of Rush Limbaugh and Howard Stern.

• (Ronald Reagan is) the President who is more responsible than any for the fact that white racism is both tolerated and even fashionable again in America.

• for every Farrakhan who riles and poisons black America, there are twenty white bigots who seek to take us into organized murder and mayhem.

• (the effort to abolish affirmative action) is led mostly by conscienceless politicians, publicity-seeking bigots, whites with individual gripes who find it easy to make trouble in a litigious society, and a handful of blacks who harbor doubts about their own intellectual merits.

• (If America abandons affirmative action, the country will take a giant step towards race war because there are) armies of raging blacks and furious Hispanics who would go ballistic over effectuation of the proposed campaigns to roll back the meager gains that nonwhites have made in America during a cruel century.

• The Federal courts . . . surrendered to racist mob psychology as cravenly as any law officer ever did in the Reconstruction South under pressure from a lynch mob. Suddenly, mass bigotry was more dominant in the so called halls of justice in 1995 than it had been in 1955.

• probably 95 percent of ‘white’ Americans have some ‘Negroid blood.’

• (T)he upsurge of violent racism in armed groups in America involves more than the United States Army, Navy, and Marine Corps. It now includes every police force in any city and county in America, the National Guard, federal agencies, and even some private ‘protective’ groups.

On the OJ Simpson Trial:

• I knew that the stories of the two murders would immediately grab the glands of millions of American white men, prejudicing them in ways they would never admit publicly. . . . (It) would enliven the insecurities of millions of white male psyches. The old college girl's chant, “Once you go black you never go back!” surely would take on feverish new meaning.

• A black friend of morbid wit said to me, ‘Doesn't O.J. know that we can f*** 'em now but we still can't kill 'em?’ . . .

• Black people would in private say that Nicole was ‘white trash,’ using her blond hair, her big breasts, her teenage pussy to woo a famous, rich, middle-aged black man away from the black woman who had sustained and nurtured him through the toughest years of his life.