Ella Rowan, Kansas City school librarian who helped teach a community, dies at 89

Editor’s note: This feature is part of a weekly focus from The Star meant to highlight and remember the lives of Black Kansas Citians who have died.

Ella Rowan taught her three children not only how to read but how to find joy in the simple, solitary practice of sitting down with an engrossing book.

When they were little, Rowan would walk them to their local branch of the Kansas City public library, ten blocks away from their home. They clenched their own library cards — a precious document, in Rowan’s eyes — and learned they could check out any book on any topic, for free. She made sure they put those slips of white paper to use, always inquiring with a teacherly curiosity what they were reading. The Dewey Decimal System was discussed at length.

Her love of reading went back to her childhood in the 1930’s, raised by a father who cleaned out train cars for a railroad company and a mother who was a domestic worker. They stressed the importance of literature with her and her two older siblings, believing books could show them a world and a future different from their reality as Black Americans in the age of Jim Crow.

Rowan, whose lifelong love of the written word blossomed into a career in which she was able to help shape the reading habits of generations of Kansas Citians, died Jan. 11, her family said. She had long struggled with kidney disease, and last month suffered a fall that resulted in a hip fracture and difficult surgery. She was 89.

In her work with kids of all ages, Ella appreciated that she could help them see what was fun and interesting about everything from reading a novel to writing properly cited research papers, her three children said in a telephone interview. Former students would approach her years later, no matter where she was, to say they remembered her and the exceedingly high standards she set for them.

“My mother said that she never had a student that she could not teach to read,” said Regina Craddolph, Rowan’s only daughter. “That was one of the things she was always proud of, because reading was one of her very — that was a strong point for her. And she was very, very strong and adamant on students reading.”

Her decades-long tenure with the Kansas City Public Schools school district left an immeasurable impact on countless Kansas Citians, like all those who sat across from her and slowly learned how to sound out words, or listened to her tell them “this was going to carry with them throughout their lives,” as Craddolph recalled.

In the 1980s, when public schools in Kansas City spent millions trying to correct years of failed desegregation efforts and outright discrimination in its enrollment, Rowan played a vital role in setting up libraries for more than a dozen new high schools and many more renovated ones. She helped pick out books and imagined, standing in the middle of empty shelves, where they should go.

Rowan retired from the district in 1990 but remained busy as ever, due to her endless interests and love of her community. She was a 50-year member of The Drifters, an African American club aimed at uplifting young people through community service, social functions and college scholarships. She played Bridge with a quick hand, competing with friends in tournaments held locally.

Her large collection of fancy church hats, full of bold colors and poofy ribbons, complemented what her children described as her graceful personality, never wanting for praise but aware of her influence.

“I know what my girlfriends called her when we talked about her,” Regina said. “They would always call me and say, ‘How is the queen doing?’”

Born on Nov. 28, 1932, in her family home on Hallock Street in northeast, Kansas City, Kansas — which has long since been torn down with the rest of the block — Rowan grew up in the middle of a tight-knit Black community, according to her youngest son, Cedric Rowan. That part of the city, near the central hub of Fifth Street, was stuffed with Black churches, businesses and homes.

It was a drastic change when she traveled the 120-plus miles south to attend Pittsburg State Teachers College where she experienced cruel disdain at her mere presence. Though she had experienced racism in the whites-only storefronts she saw and parts of town she knew, it hadn’t come into her own home before.

Black students weren’t allowed to live on campus when she first got there so she had to find housing elsewhere, in the residences of African American citizens or churches willing to open their doors. They couldn’t eat on campus on the weekends so she found food from more friendly people ready to help. There was one class where every Black student, no matter the work they turned in, got a C.

Her 31-year-old granddaughter, Rachel Craddolph, remembers when she was young Rowan told her the story of how she and the other Black students all turned in the same paper as an experiment, only to receive a round of thoughtless Cs like before.

“At the end of the day, you expect to hear like — ‘You got an A, right, grammy?’” said Rachel Craddolph, a Howard University graduate who’s now studying to get her PHD in history at the same historically Black university. “I realized what I’m gonna have to do, not only as a Black person but as a Black woman, to be able to do what I need to do.”

Rowan went on to be a respected first-grade teacher at the former Ladd Elementary School, and later climbing the library ranks. She started the library at Mary Harmon Weeks Elementary School, cataloging books over the summer and drafting a curriculum. She was brought in to serve as the librarian at a few more schools before she oversaw the whole system. Along the way she married her husband, Robert Rowan, a U.S. postman, and started a family.

In addition to being just as much a teacher as a mom, Rowan made a point to expose her kids to the eye-opening joy of art, taking them to a movie theater to see Julie Andrews become the angelically singing Maria von Trapp in “The Sound of Music.” She also took them to the Music Hall in downtown Kansas City countless times to watch the philharmonic orchestra play.

Cedric Rowan realized long ago she was trying, like her parents did with her, to show them cultures and ideas other than their own. She helped instill in them active imaginations.

“And then she did the same thing with her students,” said Cedric Rowan, now a pastor at KC First Baptist Church. “She was teaching in the urban core of the city, as we call it now, so those students also benefitted from her willingness to really take them beyond the environment they were in, to see the world bigger than what it was.”

Rachel Craddolp said her life has been shaped as much by her grandmother as anyone else.

Rowan was with her when she toured the Howard campus as a teenager and even asked the guide, who was more interested in highlighting the campus party scene, where her granddaughter would be able study. Rachel Craddolph called her grandma years later when she got her first office, working in international affairs in the state department in Washington, D.C.

“You go girl,” Rowan replied

Rachel Craddolph dedicated her final thesis paper at The College of Wooster — where she got her undergraduate degree — to her grandmother, the woman who showed her the power of words and that the sky was the limit.

“She was the reason I travelled internationally, and probably some of the reason why I’m in the career that I am today,” Rachel Craddolph said. “Because she kind of sparked that bug.”