Charlotta Spears Bass

The Black press emerged in the 19th century as a vocal force for change, not only writing about slavery and injustice, but also serving as a vital source of community and education for African Americans. The first Black-owned newspaper started in 1827; Freedom’s Journal was founded in New York by a group of free Black men and was edited by journalists Samuel Cornish and John Russworm. By 1899, W. E. B. DuBois reported that there were over 150 dailies, weeklies, magazines, and journals across the country created by and for Black people. [Source: https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2019/11/23/the-heroines-of-americas-black-press/]

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The Black newspaper The Eagle was founded by J.J. Neimore in Los Angeles, California, in 1879. Unlike the mainstream press during this era, The Eagle reported on African American stories, including racial discrimination and civil rights efforts. It also provided information on job opportunities and housing options for African Americans arriving in Los Angeles. The Eagle hired a diverse staff including African Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans.

[Image courtesy of California Eagle Collection, Southern California Library (Los Angeles, California)]

The Woman’s Era, the first national newspaper published entirely by and for Black women, was founded in 1894 by Boston journalist and clubwoman Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin. Gloria Wade-Gayles, a scholar of Black women’s history, has determined that between 1886 and 1905, nearly 50 Black women journalists were working across the country. [Source: https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2019/11/23/the-heroines-of-americas-black-press/]

Investigative journalist, Ida B. Wells, published The Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States, the first documented statistical report on lynching. Wells published this document after investigating and disproving the white claim that Black men who had been lynched were criminals. 

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The U.S. Supreme Court ruling Plessy v. Ferguson legalized racial segregation, ushering in a new era of racism and racial terror targeting African Americans. 

Little is known about her early life. But after attending a desegregated high school in Providence, Rhode Island, Bass worked selling ads and subscriptions for the Black newspaper the Providence Watchman.

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The harsh segregation policies and discrimination that African Americans experienced after the Civil War, coupled with the post-World War I shortage of industrial laborers led to a massive internal migration in the U.S. Between 1915-1970. More than 6 million African Americans escaped the racial tensions in the South in search of better employment and living opportunities in urban centers across the Northeast, Midwest, and West Coast.

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Due to unspecified health issues, Bass’s physician advised her to relocate to a warmer climate. Bass moved to Los Angeles, California, where she sold subscriptions for the Black newspaper The Eagle. 

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In 1912, on his deathbed J.J. Neimore handed The Eagle over to Bass. “I promise I will do my best,” she said. Two months later, Bass bought the newspaper at auction for $50, and renamed it The California Eagle. In 1912, Bass became one of the first African American women to own a newspaper. 

[Image courtesy of California Eagle Collection, Southern California Library (Los  Angeles, California)]

Joseph Bass was a veteran journalist and one of the founders of The Topeka Plaindealer in Kansas. In 1913, Charlotta Bass hired him as editor of The California Eagle. She remained the paper’s managing editor. Under their joint leadership, The California Eagle solidified its reputation as “a people’s paper, fighting on all fronts for the rights of the Negro people and other minorities to enjoy complete civil liberties,” as Bass wrote in her memoir. 

[Image courtesy of California Eagle Collection, Southern California Library (Los  Angeles, California)]

The film “Birth of A Nation”premiered in Los Angeles. Based on the novel The Clansman, the film glorified the Ku Klux Klan during the Civil War, inspiring violent acts against African Americans, including lynchings and a resurgence of the KKK nationwide.

In 1918, Bass visited the General Hospital in Los Angeles. Appalled by the fact that there wasn’t a single Black employee at the hospital, she approached the board of supervisors and led a campaign to end employment discrimination. The board agreed to hire a number of women, but not for nursing positions. It wasn’t until years later that Black nurses were finally hired at the General Hospital.      

[Image courtesy of California Eagle Collection, Southern California Library (Los  Angeles, California)] 

Through her reporting in The California Eagle, Bass exposed the atrocities committed by the KKK against African Americans. On one occasion, she published a letter signed by G.W. Price, the head of the Klan in California, outlining how they  planned to take control of Watts, a historically Black area in Los Angeles. Price sued Bass for libel, and then offered to drop the charges if Charlotta and Joseph Bass would agree the letter was a fraud. They declined. The California Eagle fought the libel charges and won the case. 

Bass received death threats from the Klan, and one night while working alone at the paper’s office, eight hooded KKK members showed up outside her window. She pointed a gun at them, and they ran away. On another occasion, they graffitied the letters KKK on the sidewalk outside the paper’s office. Bass reported these instances of Klan harassment, but the chief of police refused to take action. 

[Image courtesy of Los Angeles Times]

In her column, Bass drew attention to the social injustices people of color faced around the country. Bass became very vocal about housing and worker discrimination. By 1926, The California Eagle had a circulation of 60,000 and published twenty pages a week, making it the largest African American paper on the West Coast. 

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Bass became more involved in the labor movement and created the Industrial Council to combat employment discrimination, adopting the slogan “Don’t spend your money where you cannot work.” Originating in Chicago, the campaign encouraged African Americans to boycott businesses that would not hire them. 

[Image courtesy of California Eagle Collection, Southern California Library (Los  Angeles, California)]

After her husband’s unexpected death, Bass became more involved in community activism and electoral politics. She served on the executive board of the Los Angeles branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and participated in the Urban League, the Civil Rights Congress, and Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). In 1940, Bass represented the Chamber of Commerce at the Chicago Negro Exposition and was appointed the head of the Western Division of the Republican National Convention.  

[Image courtesy of California Eagle Collection, Southern California Library (Los  Angeles, California)]

Bass ran as an independent candidate for the Los Angeles City Council. Her platform was: Fight for postwar job security; A building program for homes for all who need them, regardless of race, creed, or color; Adequate health and recreational facilities; Adequate wages, and the right of labor to organize and bargain collectively; Reduce water, power, and light rates for the consumer; Clean the streets; and A rehabilitation program for veterans. She lost her campaign.

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Founded by John H. Johnson, Ebony, a photo-editorial magazine, was specifically designed for middle-class African Americans. It was the first Black magazine to attain national circulation, becoming an important source of African American culture and history. 

After being a member of the Republic Party for 30 years, Bass disaffiliated herself, disappointed by the party’s failure to advocate and address the civil rights movement and her opposition to Truman’s Cold War policies. She briefly switched to the Democratic Party and voted for president Franklin D. Roosevelt, but after his death in 1947, she also disaffiliated herself from the Democratic Party. As a result, she became a founding member of the 1948 Progressive Party. 

[Image courtesy of Department of Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, University of California at Los Angeles.]

Charlotta Bass, with 13 African American women, created the organization Sojourners for Truth and Justice to fight racial, gender, and social injustices. In 1951, they made “a call to Negro women to convene in Washington, D.C. for a Sojourn for Truth and Justice.” Other members of the Sojourners for Truth and Justice included Angie Dickerson, Shirley Graham DuBois (W.E.B. Dubois’s wife), activist Dorothy Hunton, founding member Louise Thompson Patterson, the young poet and actor Beulah Richardson, and writer Eslanda Goode Robeson (Paul Robeson’s wife). [Source: NMAAH] 

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The Red Scare was created by anti-communist propaganda in the U.S. during the Cold War. The fear of communism was rampant in American politics, culture and society. Fear of communism within the federal government increased, and President Truman ordered a loyalty investigation of federal employees. The campaign against alleged communists in the U.S. government and other institutions was carried out by Senator Joseph McCarthy. In his Congressional investigation between 1950 and 1954, many of those he accused were blacklisted or lost their jobs, although most did not belong to the Communist Party.

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On April 26, 1951, Bass published her last column “On the Sidewalk.” In it she wrote, “After more than forty years in which I have tried to serve my people and my country, as a good neighbor, as an editor, and as a fighter for Negro liberation, I feel that I must now take time out to regain my health, to learn more about what is going on in the world, and what it means for my people, and to decide how I can be most useful in the years ahead. For these reasons, and for the very practical one of the impossibility of personally financing The California Eagle any longer, I’m compelled to sell the paper. It is the hardest thing I have ever had to do in my life.” 

[Image courtesy of California Eagle (Los Angeles, California)]

Bass became the first African American woman to run for vice president of the United States in 1952, campaigning with presidential candidate Vincent Hallinan on the Progressive Party ticket. Even though they received less than 1 percent of the vote, Bass was proud that her campaign put racial issues on the political map, stating “Win or lose — we win by raising the issues.” 

In 1952, the Progressive Party  campaigned for peace with the Soviet Union, an end to the Korean War, civil rights, and women’s rights. In her campaign, Bass expressed her support for passing federal laws to outlaw racial segregation, and promote equal employment opportunities for racial minorities and women, protections for Black voters in the South, the end of the arms race, colonial rule, and apartheid in South Africa. (Source: African Americans and the presidency : the road to the White House, Carolyn Wedin) 

[Image courtesy of California Eagle Collection, Southern California Library (Los  Angeles, California)]

In her seventies, Bass transformed the garage of her home in Elsinore, California into a community reading room and voter registration site. 

[Image courtesy of California Eagle Collection, Southern California Library (Los  Angeles, California)]

The Civil Rights Act banned segregation and discrimination on the basis of sex, color, race, religion, or nationality. 

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[Image courtesy of California Eagle Collection, Southern California Library (Los Angeles, California)]

Nikole Hannah-Jones created the 1619 Project, a series of essays, images, stories, and poems observing the 400th anniversary of slaves’ first arrival in the United States and documenting how slavery has influenced nearly every aspects of modern U.S. society, culture, and politics.

[Image courtesy of The New York Times Magazine]