Paving the Way: The Radical Life of Journalist and Activist Charlotta Spears Bass
Postcard with a photograph of a young Charlotta Bass. The photograph may have been taken in Providence, where Bass (then Charlotta Spears) lived with an older brother and worked at the Providence Watchman, an African-American newspaper.
By Karla Méndez
Exploring the pioneering politics of Charlotta Spears Bass, the first Black American woman to run and operate a newspaper and to be nominated for vice-president in the United States.
Newspapers like Freedom’s Journal, the National Era, and The People's Advocate, committed to serving Black American communities, proliferated in the 19th century. The purpose of these publications was to advance the struggle for freedom and equality through exposing injustice, reporting on civil rights activism, and presenting positive images of Black identity and accomplishments. Further, the web of newspapers helped to promote a sense of community between Black Americans across the nation. Among these was the California Eagle, California’s most circulated Black American newspaper. At the helm was the journalist and civil rights activist Charlotta Spears Bass, who first sold subscriptions for the paper and after becoming the owner, utilized it to fight against the racism, sexism, and inequalities of the period.
The Start of a Long Career
Charlotta Amanda Spears was born on February 14th, the 6th of 11 children of Hiram , who was a brick mason and Kate Spears. Sources vary as to her birth year, between 1874 and 1888, and birthplace, with Sumter, South Carolina and Little Compton, Rhode Island as the most likely. At the beginning of the 20th century, Bass moved to Providence, Rhode Island to live with her older brother Ellis, who owned two restaurants and an ice truck delivery service. While there she attended Pembroke College, previously Brown University’s women’s college, and began her career in the newspaper business, selling ads and subscriptions for the Providence Watchman, a Black-owned paper.
As a sufferer of arthritis and asthma and prompted by the health benefits of California’s drier climate, Bass moved to Los Angeles in 1910. But like other Black American she was also lured by the opportunities for advancement. Writing about the city of Los Angeles, W.E.B. DuBois said: “Nowhere in the United States is the Negro so well and beautifully housed, nor the average efficiency and intelligence in the colored population so high.” While millions of Black Americans migrated from the South to Northern cities like Detroit, Chicago, and New York during the Great Migration of the 1920s, the exodus that emerged in the 1940s and became known as the Second Great Migration saw millions migrating not just to the Northeast and Midwest, but cities in the West like Oakland, Phoenix, and Seattle. Many made their way to Los Angeles at the start of World War II due to the need for labor in the production of weapons, vehicles, and materials like automobiles, rubber, and steel.
The population of Black Americans grew from 63,700 in 1940 to 763,000 in 1970. In the 1890s communities of Black Americans were beginning to form due to the opportunities for employment hauling lumber, digging ditches, cleaning toilets, laying bricks, and shining shoes. While these positions, as is still the case, relegated migrants to domestic and labor intensive spaces, by the time of the Second Great Migration they had founded essential institutions and had moved into middle-class status.
Charlotta A. Bass, publisher and editor of the California Eagle newspaper. Shades of L.A. Photo Collection. TESSA Digital Collections of the Los Angeles Public Library.
Journalism as a Weapon of Radical Activism
In 1910, upon her relocation to Los Angeles, she began working for The Eagle, the oldest and widest circulated Black American newspaper on the West Coast, selling subscriptions. By 1912 she had assumed the role of editor when the founder John Neimore passed away. Shortly after, she became the first Black American woman to own and operate a newspaper in the United States, when bought the newspaper for $50 at auction and renamed it the California Eagle, challenging the male-dominated composition of newsrooms during this time.
Bass brought on Kansas journalist and co-founder of the Topeka Plaindealer Joseph Bass to be editor in 1913, while she retained the role of managing editor. Two years later, they married and together expanded the newspaper, building it from a four-page tabloid to a 20-page weekly. Contrary to the hiring practices that were prevalent in Los Angeles during this period and which the Eagle challenged, Bass applied a non-discriminatory recruitment ethos, bringing on Black, Latinx, and Asian-American staff members.
In its pages, they addressed social and political issues like racial violence, and discrimination in schools, housing, and the job market, as well as reported on community news. She also highlighted the police violence experienced by Black Americans by printing it on the front-page of the newspaper and organizing community meetings to demand police reform. For Bass, the newspaper was a tool for activism, utilizing it to wage campaigns like attempting to block the production of D.W. Griffith’s 1915 film Birth of a Nation, calling attention to the racist hiring practices in Los Angeles, and printing in detail the crimes of the Ku Klux Klan.
This included publishing a letter written by G.W. Price, the leader of California’s Klan chapter that uncovered a plot to frame the three most successful Black leaders in a traffic accident and convict them of driving while intoxicated. The act would not only perpetuate the argument that Black Americans were innately criminally inclined but would also no doubt lead to the closure of businesses, resulting in the loss or shrinking of a Black middle-class. Bass’ confrontation with the Klan led to them suing her for libel. She faced a year in prison and would have to pay damages of five thousand dollars, but was ultimately successful in the courtroom. Similar to Mary McLeod Bethune’s violent run-in with the Klan in Daytona, Florida in 1920 due to her work to register and mobilize Black American voters, the Klan in California showed up at the Eagle office while Bass was alone, but she was able to ward them off with a pistol.
“[Charlotta Bass] was a foremother in a lot of ways, really, not just to address issues but to show strategies that were successful in addressing them.”
The Start of a Long Career
Bass introduced the Great Depression era “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work” campaign to Los Angeles in the 1930s. It was a series of protests in which Black activists boycotted stores owned by White Americans in Black neighborhoods that contributed to a high unemployment rate among Black Americans, double the national average. As the title suggests, it encouraged Black Americans to not give their hard earned money to establishments that would not hire them. The campaign was successful in developing hiring programs that were also the first affirmative action programs and created a model template for 1960s direct-action civil rights protests.
She also continued her work fighting against racist housing restrictions that confined Black Americans to specific parts of the city, and kept them from being able to secure loans or mortgages through the use of covenant, higher than typical interest rates, and intimidation. She helped start the Home Owners Protective Association in 1945, which was formed to combat housing covenants in the courts.
In 1934, Bass’ husband Joseph passed away, leaving Bass to run the newspaper on her own. Like other Black American presses in the 1930s who campaigned for things like fair hiring practices and an end to segregated housing, the Eagle found itself under investigation by the Office of the Security of War. The office viewed these publications as a threat to national security, with the Department of Justice believing that the newspaper had been funded by Japan and Germany. The FBI interrogated Bass in 1942 and after that, continued to surveil her, reading every issue of the Eagle, attending her public speeches. The resulting surveillance reports sent directly to J. Edgar Hoover would eventually amount to an FBI file of 563 pages. In 1943, the Post Office argued that the newspaper could not be mailed because it contained sensitive and illegal material and requested that her mailing permit be revoked. Ultimately, the Department of Justice decided in Bass’ favor.
“Historic for myself, for my people, for all women. For the first time in the history of this nation a political party has chosen a Negro woman for the second-highest office in the land.”
Charlotta Bass receives a warm welcome home when she was running for congress in the 14th District. Security Pacific National Bank Collection. TESSA Digital Collections of the Los Angeles Public Library.
Building a Historical Political Career
Bass continued to run the Eagle until 1951 when she sold it and moved to New York City. During this time she began to become involved with civil rights organizations like the Civil Rights Congress , the National Urban League, and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Bass also co-founded and served as the national chairman of the Sojourners for Truth and Justice, a trans-national radical civil rights organization that mobilized Black women against Jim Crow and U.S. Cold War domestic and foreign policy. Her radical work with these organizations and her use of the newspaper to fight against injustices and inequality made her a target of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and in 1950, she was questioned by California’s Joint Fact-Finding Committee on Un-American Activities. She and the newspaper were ultimately found innocent.
The governmental monitoring and ostracization Bass endured extended to her work with civic organizations. The NAACP tore up her membership card and the Black sorority Iota Phi Lambda, revoked her honorary membership. Additionally her international travel was restricted and when she was able to travel overseas, C.I.A. agents would follow her.
Committing her life to politics, Bass became the first Black American woman to be nominated for vice-president in 1952, 68 years before Kamala Harris, running on the Progressive Party’s ticket with San Francisco attorney Vincent Hallinan. As a vice-president candidate, she campaigned on a platform of civil rights, decent jobs, peace, and equality, with the slogan, “Win or lose, we win by raising the issues.” Bass accepted her nomination in Chicago in front of 2,000 delegates and was endorsed by Black American activists like Paul Robeson and W.E.B. DuBois. During her nomination acceptance speech she declared that it was a historic moment, saying: “Historic for myself, for my people, for all women. For the first time in the history of this nation a political party has chosen a Negro woman for the second-highest office in the land.” In the early 1960s, Bass retired to Lake Elsinore, California, then known as a Black resort town. There she utilized her garage as a community reading room and a voter registration site for Black Americans. She suffered a stroke in 1966, passing away in 1969 from a brain hemorrhage.
Charlotta Bass is shown speaking at the Bethel A.M.E. Church in San Francisco, during Negro History Week (now Black History Week), February 1965. Mrs. Frances Albrier is seated in the background. 1965. Photo by John H. Dorsey. Security Pacific National Bank Collection. TESSA Digital Collections of the Los Angeles Public Library.
Where are Charlotta Spears Bass’ Flowers?
Bass’ use of picket lines, boycotts, protests, and political pressure are powerful techniques, still used today. “She was a foremother in a lot of ways, really, not just to address issues but to show strategies that were successful in addressing them,” Susan Rattley says of Bass activism. Far overdue, Bass was inducted into the California Newspaper Hall of Fame in December 2017.
The fact that upon being elected as the first Black American vice-president in 2020 Bass’ name wasn’t mentioned is evident of the disregard for Black feminist history our society has. As has too often been the case with Black American women who have historically paved the way and significantly contributed to the political and social landscape of Black Americans, Bass’ name has been overlooked and omitted from history books. In 1960, she had an autobiography published Forty Years: Memoirs From the Pages of a Newspaper, but few copies remain in circulation today. The Eagle offices, which were located at 4071 - 4075 South Central Avenue, the heart of the Black community that once thrived there, are now an appliance store. She is not even remembered in her final resting place at Evergreen Cemetery in Boyle Heights as it only bears her husband's name, with whom she shares a plot.
Despite devoting decades of her life to improving and furthering the life of Black Americans, the life and work of Bass remains neglected. Over the last few years, there has been an intentional move to bring her to the forefront, positioning her in her rightful place in history.
About the author: Karla Méndez (she/her) is currently a student at Brown University, pursuing a master’s in American Studies. She recently graduated from the University of Central Florida, where she majored in Interdisciplinary Studies with a double minor in Political Science and Women’s and Gender Studies. Her research interests include Black feminist histories and movements, Black American literature, Black and Latina cultural productions, and social structures. When she isn’t studying, she fills up her time with books. She also enjoys watching 90s and early 00s films, drawing, and journaling. You can follow her on Instagram at @kmmendez.