CHARLOTTA BASS. ONE OF SO MANY FORGOTTEN . EL PAÍS ENGLISH

INTERNATIONAL WOMEN'S DAY

Charlotta Bass: Black, progressive and a vice-presidential candidate 70 years before Kamala Harris

Editor and owner of a newspaper and founder of her own political party, Bass was a pivotal figure among African-Americans in the early and mid-20th century, but her name faded from history

Charlotta Bass has no tombstone to mark her burial place. She has gone so unnoticed by history that there is not a single street, square, or park in the United States officially named for her. But she came before so many others; before almost all the others. Charlotta Amanda Spears, born in rural South Carolina in the late 19th century, was an inconceivable figure. Female and Black, the sixth of 11 children and educated in public schools, she became the owner and publisher of an influential newspaper for nearly four decades, founded political parties, ran twice for Congress and once for the Los Angeles City Council and was the first African-American woman to appear on the vice-presidential ballot, in 1952, almost 70 years before Kamala Harris or the current mayor of Los Angeles, Karen Bass, who is no relation to her namesake, were elected.

...and she moved to an emerging Los Angeles.

In the early 1900s, the California city was ablaze with the birth of motion pictures, streetcars, and mass media. And an unstoppable Bass (then still Charlotta Spears) was eager to work. In Rhode Island she had sold advertising and newspaper subscriptions, and when she arrived in Los Angeles she managed to place herself similarly at The California Eagle, which was aimed at a Black readership and located in the heart of community in Los Angeles, among churches and jazz clubs. “The Eagleilluminated Black life in a way that was not illuminated in other papers,” Angeleno journalist Erin Aubry Kaplan, whose uncle wrote for the publication in the 1950s, told The New York Times. The paper’s white founder saw Bass’s talent and she grew in the organization. So much so that when he became ill, he offered to let her keep the paper...if she would become his girlfriend. She refused, and when he died, she borrowed $50 and bought the paper at auction in 1912.

As owner she decided to hire a prominent Kansas publisher, Joseph Bass, whom she married in 1914. At the helm, they made big editorial bets that saw the Eagle become the largest African-American-focused media outlet in the West, growing from four to 20 pages and selling 60,000 copies. They unabashedly attacked the Ku Klux Klan; in fact, several members showed up one night at Charlotta Bass’s office. She was alone and did not hesitate to pull out the pistol she kept in her drawer to encourage them to leave the way they had come. They criticized the racism of The Birth of a Nation, and even wanted to stop the filming of the movie, which brought them national fame. 

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