Charlotta Bass

Charlotta Bass and Paul Robeson, Los Angeles, 1949

Charlotta Amanda Spears Bass (February 14, 1874^[1] – April 12, 1969) was an American educator, newspaper publisher-editor, and civil rights activist. Bass was probably the first African-American woman to own and operate a newspaper in the United States; she published the California Eagle from 1912 until 1951.^[2] In 1952 Bass became the first African-American woman nominated for Vice President, as a candidate of the Progressive Party.

Background

She was born Charlotta Spears in Sumter, South Carolina, the sixth of eleven children^[3] of Hiram Spears, a brick mason, and his wife, Kate, a housewife.

She moved to Rhode Island after high school and began working in the newspaper business.^[4] In 1910 Spears moved to Los Angeles, California to improve her health.

Career

Soon after arriving in the city, she took a job selling subscriptions to the small African-American newspaper the California Owl. Just before the owner John J. Neimore died in 1912, he asked Bass to take over the paper. Changing the name to the California Eagle, Bass in 1913 hired Joseph Blackburn "J.B" Bass. She eventually promoted him as the editor of the paper.^[5]

Marriage and family

Spears and Bass married.^[5] After J.B. Bass's died in 1934, Charlotta Bass took a more direct role as editor.

Expansion of paper

Charlotta Bass lived in the 52nd Place Historic District during the 1930s.

By 1925, the California Eagle employed a staff of twelve and published twenty pages a week. The Eagle's circulation of 60,000 made it the largest African-American newspaper on the West Coast.^[6]

As editor and publisher of the California Eagle, the oldest black newspaper on the West Coast, Charlotta Bass fought against restrictive covenants in housing^[7] and segregated schools in Los Angeles. She also campaigned to end job discrimination at the Los Angeles General Hospital, the Los Angeles Rapid Transit Company, the Southern Telephone Company, and the Boulder Dam Project. Bass was co-president of the Los Angeles division of Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association^[8] during the early 1920s. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, she continued to encourage black businesses with the campaign known as "Don't Buy Where You Can't Work".^[9]

In 1943, Bass led a group of black leaders to the office of the Mayor of Los Angeles, Fletcher Bowron's office. They demanded an expansion of the Mayor's Committee on American Unity, more public mass meetings to promote interracial unity, and an end to the discriminatory hiring practices of the privately owned Los Angeles Railway Company. The mayor listened, but agreed to do no more than to expand his committee.^[10]

Bass was the director of the Youth Movement of the NAACP. The Youth NAACP had 200 members, including some actors and actresses, such as Lena Horne, Hattie McDaniel, and Louise Beavers.^[11] She also served in 1952 as the National Chairman of the Sojourners for Truth and Justice, an organization of black women set up to protest racial violence in the South.^[12] After years as a registered Republican,^[13] she left the party in 1948.^[14] In the Progressive Party presidential campaign of 1952, Bass was the running mate of lawyer Vincent Hallinan.^[15]

Bass wrote her last column for the California Eagle on April 26, 1951, and sold the paper soon after. Considering the sum of her career as she was completing her autobiography, Forty Years (1960), Bass wrote: "It has been a good life that I have had, through a very hard one, but I know the future will be even better, And as I think back I know that is the only kind of life: In serving one's fellow man one serves himself best . . . "^[16]

Charlotta Bass died April 12, 1969 of a cerebral hemorrhage in Los Angeles, California.

See also

• List of Los Angeles municipal election returns, 1945, for the results of her bid for City Council

References

1. ^ Birthdate listed as 1874 from Charlotta Bass via PBS, and October 1880 from Encyclopaedia Britannica and others.
2. ^ Nancy A. Hewitt. A Companion to American Women's History, Blackwell Publishing, p. 237, (2002) - ISBN 0631212523
3. ^ Charlotta Bass: Her Story, Charlotta Bass and the California Eagle, Southern California Library for Social Studies and Research, accessed 13 March 2011
4. ^ Robert Gottlieb. The Next Los Angeles: The Struggle for a Livable City, Net Library, University of California Press, p. 50 (2005) - ISBN 0520240006
5. ^ ^{a b} Robert Gottlieb. The Next Los Angeles: the Struggle for a Livable City, p. 51
6. ^ Rodger Streitmatter. Raising Her Voice-Pa: African-American Women Journalists who Changed History, University Press of Kentucky, p. 100, (1994) - ISBN 0813108306
7. ^ Thomas R. Hietala. The Fight of the Century: Jack Johnson, Joe Louis, and the Struggle for Racial Equality, M.E. Sharpe, p. 208, (2002) - ISBN 0765607220
8. ^ Marcus Garvey. The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association Papers, University of California Press, p. 92 (1983) - ISBN 0520054466
9. ^ Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, Sharon Harley. The Afro-American Woman: Struggles and Images, Black Classic Press, 1997 - ISBN 1574780263
10. ^ Gerald D. Nash. The American West Transformed: The Impact of the Second World War, University of Nebraska Press, p. (1990) - ISBN 0803283601
11. ^ Robert L. Allen, Lee Brown. Strong in the Struggle: My Life as a Black Labor Activist, Rowman & Littlefield, p. 42, (2001) - ISBN 0847691918
12. ^ Gerald Horne. Race Woman: The Lives of Shirley Graham Du Bois, NYU Press, p. 144, (2002) - ISBN 0814736483
13. ^ "California Voter Registrations [database on-line"]. United States: The Generations Network. 1916. http://www.ancestry.com. Retrieved 2008-09-11. 
14. ^ "California Voter Registrations [database on-line"]. United States: The Generations Network. 1948. http://www.ancestry.com. Retrieved 2008-09-11. 
15. ^ Johnson, John H., ed. (March 20, 1952) "Charlotta Bass named for presidential ticket" Jet (Chicago, Illinois: Johnson Publishing Company, Inc.) 1 (21) 
16. ^ Charotta A. Bass, Forty Years: Memoirs from the Pages of a Newspaper (Los Angeles: C.A. Bass, 1960)

Further reading

John M. Findlay. Power and Place in the North American West by Richard White. University of Washington Press, 1999. ISBN 0295977736

External links

• Charlotta Bass and the California Eagle, Southern California Library for Social Studies & Research
• "Charlotta A. Bass Collection, 1924-77", Southern California Library for Social Studies & Research
• Charlotta A. Bass, Black Past

Preceded by Glen H. Taylor

Progressive Party Vice Presidential candidate 1952 (lost)

Succeeded by —

Persondata
Name	Bass, Charlotta
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth	February 14, 1874
Place of birth
Date of death	April 12, 1969
Place of death