Charles P. Howard, Sr.: Iowan, UN Correspondent, and Advocate for Racial Justice and Human Rights

Charles P. Howard, Sr.: Iowan, UN Correspondent, and Advocate for Racial Justice and Human Rights

By Debra DeLaet (Executive Director, Iowa United Nations Association)

In recognition of Human Rights Day 2024, this blog explores the work of Charles P. Howard, Sr., an important if not widely known figure in Iowa history, who played a critical role in advocating for racial justice and human rights in the state and beyond.

The life of Charles P. Howard, Sr., an Iowan who became a UN Correspondent, shines light on the intersection of domestic and international politics during the Cold War and the era of African decolonization.

Born in 1890 in Des Moines, Howard made notable achievements during his lifetime. In 1917, he graduated from the Fort Des Moines officer-candidate school and went on to serve in France during World War I. After the war, he returned to Iowa where he completed his law degree at Drake University in 1920. Refused admission to the American Bar Association (ABA) as a Black lawyer, Howard co-founded the National Bar Association (NBA), a national network of Black lawyers, in 1925. During the 1920s and 1930s, Howard also served as a columnist for the Iowa Bystander, an Iowa newspaper published for a predominantly African American audience. In 1939, Howard also founded the Iowa Observer, an African American newspaper that later expanded to Indiana and Wisconsin.

Throughout his career in both law and journalism, Howard was committed to the pursuit of racial justice and human rights for Black Americans. In 1948-49, he served as lead attorney for Edna Griffin and other Black Iowans in their lawsuits against Katz Drug Store for discrimination. Due to an array of client complaints about ethical misconduct, Howard voluntarily surrendered his law license in 1951 and, despite personal efforts and public advocacy, was never readmitted to the Iowa Bar.

Like many Black activists during the post-World War II era, Howard’s human rights activism got tangled up with the emerging ideological politics of the Cold War. Howard’s activism aligned with outreach by Black organizations to the new United Nations as an international institution to which they could appeal for human rights and racial justice. In 1947, the NAACP submitted An Appeal to the World, a statement documenting widespread racial injustices and violence, to the United Nations asking for the organization to provide redress Black Americans. In 1951, the Civil Rights Congress submitted a petition titled We Charge Genocide to the United Nations, using the newly adopted Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide as a framework for analyzing and advocating against racial violence and injustice in the United States.

Reflecting efforts by Black advocacy organizations to internationalize the struggle for human rights in the United States, Howard worked closely with Paul Robeson, W.E.B. DuBois, and Charlotta Bass in efforts to fight Jim Crow segregation in the Panama Canal Zone. Each of these Black activists was surveilled by the FBI during the 1940s due both to their ties with the Soviet Union and their advocacy for racial justice and equality during this period of history. In her book Eyes Off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944-1955, historian Carol Anderson shows how the struggle for human rights for African Americans narrowed to the pursuit of civil and political rights as the work of Black activists like Robeson and DuBois was discredited by their ideological ties to Communist ideology and the Soviet Union. Howard’s professional trajectory was likewise shaped by these political dynamics. Howard received widespread public criticism after attending the 1950 World Peace Congress (a Communist-sponsored event) in Warsaw, Poland and subsequently moved to New York City in 1951.

In New York, Howard worked as a UN correspondent whose worked focused on the decolonization movements in Africa and on the struggles of newly independent African countries. Published as part of the Howard News Syndicate, a group of 34 newspapers in the United States and abroad, Howard’s UN correspondence examined the intersection of domestic struggles for racial justice and human rights in the United States and self-determination movements for African peoples seeking independence from European colonial powers.

The Charles Preston Howard Collection in the Drake University Archives offers rich, primary source material including Howard’s UN correspondence along with other documentary evidence chronicling both domestic and global struggles for racial justice. In a 1960 editorial, Howard explicitly linked lunch-counter sit-ins in the American South to anti-colonial resistance movements throughout Africa.[1] Howard’s UN correspondence also includes a “hate letter” sent by the Ku Klux Klan to UN delegates from predominantly Black countries and UN Ambassador Adlai Stevenson’s response.[2] As this exchange shows, it was impossible to disentangle the domestic struggle for racial justice in the United States from broader global struggles for racial justice and human rights.

Charles P. Howard, Sr., died in 1969.

[1] Charles Preston Howard Papers, Howard News Service Newsletters (1960)

[2] Charles Preston Howard Papers, Box 04; Folder 2 of 12 (1961)