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.
Charlotta Bass’s story is enough for a movie or a few seasons of a television show. Her date of birth is known, but not the exact year: she was born on February 14, sometime between 1874 and 1888. And although everything seems to indicate that she was born in Sumter, South Carolina, she may have been born in Rhode Island. When she was very young, she moved there to live with a brother who owned two restaurants. In Rhode Island, a quieter area than the turbulent South, she studied for a semester at Pembroke College, now part of Brown University. But the arthritis and asthma she suffered from called for warmer climes 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 Eagle illuminated 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. They launched a campaign to shop only in stores where they were allowed to work. They advocated the creation of Black jobs in hospitals, railroads, and telephone companies. They expanded their city — and thus their world — and the way their community was present in it, and they performed their activism from their milieu, but also by their own management. When Joseph died in 1934, Charlotta remained at the helm for almost 20 more years, until 1951, when she sold the Eagle.
Then she got the political bug and began to run as a possible candidate. Although she declared herself a Republican, she had once voted for the Democrats and did not care for either party. A pacifist, she was opposed to the atomic bomb and placed under surveillance due to her suspected Communist sympathies. She founded the socialist-leaning Progressive Party of California, which was quite radical for that era. She teamed up with a well-known white San Francisco lawyer, Vincent Hallinan, in the presidential election of 1952. Although they only garnered 0.2% of the vote, for the first time, a Black woman descended from slaves had placed herself on the ballot and had been able to run for the White House, at a time when the end of racial segregation was still a distant dream; the Civil Rights Act would eventually come in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act in 1965. At a rally she gave in Chicago in 1952, she declared: “This is a historic moment in American political life. 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.”
Bass retired to a quiet area of Los Angeles and remained interested in politics and social rights until the end of her days. In 1960, she wrote an autobiography, Forty Years: Memoirs From the Pages of a Newspaper, of which barely a handful of copies exist. She suffered a heart attack in 1966 and died in 1969. She was buried in a small plot next to her husband, under a headstone that bears only his name, in a cemetery near downtown. She may never have had a grave, but she did have a day: the University of Southern California inaugurated the Charlotta Bass Journalism and Justice Lab in 2022 and lobbied district representatives and the mayor to set a date to honor her. In 2023, Karen Bass proclaimed February 14 as Charlotta Bass Day, a holiday in the city of Los Angeles. Even if they are not related, the circle can now be closed.
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