As a student, Blow interned at the
Shreveport Times,
News Journal, and
The New York Times, edited the student newspaper, the
Gramblinite, and founded the now-defunct student magazine,
Razz. He also served as president of Grambling State's chapter of
Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity. After graduation, he joined
The Detroit News as a graphics artist. Blow joined
The New York Times in 1994 as a graphics editor. Eventually, he became the head of the newspaper's graphics department. In 2006, he left to become the
art director of
National Geographic. In April 2008, he began writing a column in
The New York Times. His column had originally appeared biweekly on Saturdays. In May 2009, it became a weekly feature and appeared twice, weekly, in December 2012. As of May 2021, it appears every Monday and Thursday. Blow would appear frequently on
CNN and
MSNBC during this period. On February 22, 2012, Blow referred to
Republican presidential candidate
Mitt Romney's "magic underwear", an apparent reference to the
Temple Garment, in response to a comment by Romney about two-parent households. The comment was criticized as insensitive to
Mormons. In response, Romney joked that "I guess we're finding out for the first time that the media is somewhat biased." In August 2016, while appearing on CNN with Bruce Levell, a delegate for
Donald Trump's
presidential campaign, Blow called Trump a "bigot" and said that anyone who supported Trump is "a part of the bigotry itself." In June 2019,
Opera Theatre of Saint Louis presented the first performance of
an opera adaptation of Blow's memoir
Fire Shut Up in My Bones, with music by Grammy Award-winning jazz musician and composer
Terence Blanchard. In September 2021, the
Metropolitan Opera in New York City opened its 2021–2022 season with that work. This was the
Met's first performance of an opera by a Black composer. In response to the 2020
Central Park birdwatching incident, Blow wrote an op-ed in which he said, "Specifically, I am enraged by White women weaponizing racial anxiety, using their White femininity to activate systems of White terror against Black men. This has long been a power White women realized they had and that they exerted." In 2021, Blow published
The Devil You Know: A Black Manifesto in which he advocates people of color taking direct action by moving to states where they can build a political majority. In April 2021, Blow began hosting
Prime with Charles M. Blow, a primetime show on the
Black News Channel. It ran until March 2022 when the channel shut down all produced programming. On March 29, 2022, he joined MSNBC as a political analyst. In January 2025, Blow announced that he was leaving the
New York Times. He was appointed to
Harvard University as its inaugural
Langston Hughes Fellow in the
W. E. B. Du Bois Research Institute, which supports scholars and artists whose work embodies the spirit of Hughes' literary legacy and commitment to social justice. ==Personal life==