Charlotta Spears Bass
(February 14, 1874 – April 12, 1969)
Journalist, Educator, Newspaper Publisher-Editor, And Civil Rights Activist activist who as editor of the California Eagle, championed African-American equality and freedom.
Charlotta was Born on February 14, 1874, in Sumter, South Carolina, Charlotta Spears Bass worked as managing editor of the African-American newspaper The California Eagle. She and her husband Joseph Bass called for an end to segregation and denounced groups like the Klu Klux Klan, among a host of other issues. Bass would later become the first black woman to run for U.S. vice president.
She also focused on various other issues such as housing rights, voting rights, and labor rights, as well as police brutality and harassment. She published the California Eagle from 1912 until 1951. In 1952, Bass became the first African-American woman nominated for Vice President, as a candidate of the Progressive Party.
Due to her activities, Bass was repeatedly accused of being part of the Communist Party, for which there was no evidence and which Bass herself repeatedly denied. She was monitored by the FBI, who continued to view her as a potential security threat until she was in her nineties.
During the 1920s, Bass became co-president of the Los Angeles chapter of the Universal Negro Improvement Association, founded by Marcus Garvey. Bass formed the Home Protective Association to defeat housing covenants in all-white neighborhoods. She helped found the Industrial Business Council, which fought discrimination in employment practices and encouraged black people to go into business. As editor and publisher of the California Eagle, the oldest black newspaper on the West Coast, Bass fought against restrictive covenants in housing and segregated schools in Los Angeles. She campaigned to end job discrimination at the Los Angeles General Hospital, the Los Angeles Rapid Transit Company, the Southern Telephone Company, and the Boulder Canyon Project.
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”. A longtime Republican, she voted for President Franklin D. Roosevelt, a Democrat, in 1936.
As a leader of both the NAACP and the UNIA, Bass spanned the divide between integrationist and separatist black politics. She was the director of the Youth Movement of the NAACP. It had 200 members, including some actors and actresses, such as Lena Horne, Hattie McDaniel, and Louise Beavers.
In 1940, the Republican Party chose Bass as the western regional director for Wendell Willkie’s presidential campaign. Three years later, she became the first African-American grand jury member for the Los Angeles County Court. Also 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. Then later in the 1940s, Bass left the Republican Party and joined the Progressive Party because she believed neither of the major parties was committed to civil rights.
Bass also ran for the Los Angeles City Council in the 1940s using the song-title slogan “Don’t Fence Me In” to highlight her condemnation of housing discrimination.
Bass 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. That year, she was nominated for vice president of the United States by the Progressive Party. She was the running mate of lawyer Vincent Hallinan. Bass became the first African-American woman to run for vice president of the United States. Her platform called for civil rights, women’s rights, an end to the Korean War, and peace with the Soviet Union. Bass’s slogan during the vice presidential campaign was, “Win or lose, we win by raising the issues.”She was endorsed by Paul Robeson, W.E.B. DuBois, and Ada B. Jackson in campaign material during her run. She began the campaign on her own as Hallinan served out a six-month contempt of court sentence arising from his legal defense of union leader Harry Bridges.
Bass worked on issues that also attracted Luisa Moreno, who was active in Afro-Chicano politics in Los Angeles during the 1930s-1950. No record shows that the two women ever met, but in 1943 both served on the Sleepy Lagoon Defense Committee, a multiracial group that fought for the release of several Chicanos convicted of murder by an all-white jury making Bass and Moreno part of the same “constellation” of struggle. 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 serves himself best……
In 1966, Bass had a stroke and afterward retired to a Los Angeles nursing home. In 1967, at age ninety-one the FBI still classified Charlotta Bass as a potential security threat.
During her years of retirement, she maintained a library in her garage for the young people in her neighborhood. It was a continuation of her long fight to give all people opportunities and education. She died in Los Angeles on April 12, 1969, from a cerebral hemorrhage. She is buried alongside her husband in Evergreen Cemetery, Boyle Heights, East Los Angeles, California. The grave marker only names her husband.