A funeral will be held on campus Saturday for Jan Carew, professor emeritus and first chair of the Department of African American Studies who died Dec. 6 in Louisville, Ky. after a long and multifaceted career. He was 92.
Don Rojas, a friend of Carew, once described him as the “quintessential Renaissance man,” a man who was not only a professor, but also an “author, historian, internationalist, public intellectual, social justice activist and pioneer in experimenting with sustainable lifestyles for people of color.”
Carew was born in Guyana in 1920, and moved to the United States to 1944 to pursue studies at Howard University and Case Western University. Soon after, he decided to continue his studies abroad in Europe. There, he studied at Charles University in Prague and the Sorbonne in Paris.
He also toured in the Netherlands as an actor and worked as a writer for the BBC in London, experiences that Carew drew on in his later writing.
After returning to the United States, Carew joined the faculty of Princeton University in 1969. After a short stint there, Carew accepted an appointment at Northwestern in 1973 and became the first chair of the young Department of African American Studies.
The formation of the department was one of the demands that NU President J. Roscoe Miller agreed to in order to peacefully end a sit-in by African American students at the bursar’s office in 1968. Carew built the department from scratch, hiring new faculty and establishing the department’s foundation in what the department of African American study's website calls “a diasporic approach to Black studies.”
“The vitality of the African American studies department at Northwestern is due in no small part to Jan Carew’s leadership,” read a statement released by Celeste Watkins-Hayes, current chair of the Department.
In one of many planned tributes to Carew, the Institute of Race Relations – which publishes the journal Race & Class – will produce a special edition of the journal in honor of Carew titled “The Gentle Revolutionary.”
“Once in a while, a man or woman comes along who epitomises the best of the worst of time and shines out like a beacon to signal us to the further shores of hope,” said A. Sivanandan, director of the Institute, in a press release. “Jan Carew is one of them.”
The funeral will take place Saturday, Jan. 12 at 11 a.m. at Alice Millar Chapel. A reception will follow in the John Evans Alumni Center.