She lived 95 years, as many years as necessary to complete the work she felt called to do. And the FBI maintained a file on her up until the end.
Educator. Newspaper publisher. Civil rights activist. Housing and labor rights advocate. Outspoken critic of police violence. Vice presidential candidate.
Charlotta Spears Bass was all of that, and more.
She was born on Valentine’s Day, 1874 and grew up in Rhode Island. When she was 20, Charlotta moved to Providence to live with her brother, selling subscriptions to the Providence Watchman, a Black newspaper, to make a living. She worked for the paper for 10 years.
In 1910, Charlotta moved to Los Angeles for health reasons and began working for the California Eagle, a newspaper for the Black community that had been publishing since 1876. At first she sold subscriptions, but after the owner died Charlotta became editor and eventually bought the paper for $50 at auction. She and her husband John Bass published the Eagle until Charlotta sold it in 1952.
The entire story isn’t that simple, of course. The California Eagle was founded in 1879 as The California Owl by John J. Neimore, a Black reporter and publisher who served as editor until he died in 1912. It was the oldest Black newspaper on the West coast, and the most influential, serving as a local news and community resource for the thousands of Black people moving to southern California.
As his health declined, Neimore named Charlotta as his successor. After he died, she discovered that the newspaper was actually owned by a white man, who promised to support Charlotta only if she agreed to be his girlfriend. She said no, borrowed $50 from a local businessman, and bought the paper herself when it went up for auction.
In 1912 Charlotta hired John Bass, a newspaperman from Topeka, Kansas, as editor. They shared the same views on racial injustice and discrimination, and together expanded the newspaper’s coverage to include the social and political issues affecting the Black community that were ignored by the white press.
They made a formidable team. Charlotta and John married, and together grew the Eagle’s circulation to more than 60,000 subscribers. Charlotta wrote a weekly column, “On the Sidewalk,” that advocated for civil rights for both the Black and Mexican American communities, and suggested reforms. The newspaper was the first to stand against the release of “The Birth of a Nation,” DW Griffiths’ 1915 silent film celebrating the Ku Klux Klan; the Klan, in fact, threatened Charlotta for years, at one point suing her for libel for publishing a letter it sent to members advocating the murder of Black leaders. The Klan lost.
Joseph Bass died in 1934, and Charlotta became the newspaper’s sole publisher. She also became a target of the federal government, specifically the Office of the Secretary of War, which was investigating the California Eagle, and other Black owned newspapers, as posing a threat to national security.
During World War II, the government claimed the newspaper was funded by the Japanese and German governments, and in 1943 the US Post Office asked the Department of Justice to revoke the Eagle’s mailing permit. (It didn’t.) After the war ended, the FBI spent years investigating Charlotta for being a member of the Communist Party, an unproven accusation that she repeatedly denied.
Still, Charlotta continued to publish until 1952, when she sold the California Eagle and moved to New York in order to focus on politics.
The move wasn’t a surprise.
In the early 1920s, Charlotta became involved in politics through the Universal Negro Improvement Association, an organization founded by Marcus Garvey that fought housing and employment discrimination, and school segregation. Her slogan, “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work”, encouraged people to support businesses with fair hiring practices during the Great Depression. In the 1940s she was named director of the Youth Movement of the NAACP, rubbing elbows with famous Black civil rights advocates including Lena Horne, Hattie McDaniel and Paul Robeson. She even ran for the Los Angeles City Council.
Charlotta joined the Progressive Party in the late 1940s, believing that Republicans and Democrats lacked an urgent commitment to civil rights. In 1952 the party nominated her for vice president of the United States, the first Black woman to be nominated for the office; her platform advocated for civil rights, women’s rights, ending the Korean War and peace with the Soviet Union.
After her unsuccessful campaign, Charlotta was named the national chairman of Sojourners for Truth and Justice, an organization of Black woman protesting racial violence in the South. She continued her political work and in 1960 published Forty Years, her memoir.
All this time the FBI monitored where she went, with whom she met, and the speeches she gave — and continued to do so well into Charlotta’s nineties.
Charlotta officially retired in 1966 after suffering a stroke. During her retirement she kept a library in her garage that stayed open for the young people in her neighborhood to use.
She died in 1969 and is buried next to her husband in East Los Angeles. The grave marker only lists his name.
In her final column for the California Eagle, Charlotta wrote: “It has been a good life that I have had, though 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.”