Bass, Charlotta Amanda Spears
1874-1969 · Contribution: 1912-1951
Became the first African American woman to own and operate a newspaper in the United States, running the California Eagle for nearly four decades, then became the first Black woman nominated for U.S. vice president in 1952
Portraits are AI-generated interpretations, not photographs.
Impact on the world
Taking over the California Eagle in 1912 at the deathbed request of its founder, John Neimore, and purchasing it at auction for $50 borrowed from a local storeowner, Bass built the paper — renamed and co-run with husband Joseph Bass after their 1914 marriage — into the largest African American newspaper on the West Coast, with a circulation reaching roughly 60,000. She used the Eagle to campaign against housing covenants, job discrimination at institutions including Los Angeles General Hospital and the Boulder Dam Project, and the release of D.W. Griffith's “Birth of a Nation,” helping get the film banned in some communities, while also serving as co-president of the Los Angeles chapter of Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association. She sold the paper in 1951 amid FBI surveillance and communist accusations tied to her civil rights activism, and the following year became the first African American woman nominated for vice president, running on the Progressive Party ticket — nearly seven decades before Kamala Harris became the first Black woman elected to the office.
Life & background
Born Charlotta Amanda Spears on February 14 in either 1874 or 1880 (sources conflict), in Sumter, South Carolina, the sixth of eleven children, Bass moved to Providence, Rhode Island, around age 20, working a decade selling subscriptions for the Black-owned Providence Watchman while attending Pembroke College at Brown University. She relocated to Los Angeles in 1910 for her health and took a subscription-selling job at the California Eagle, where founder John Neimore recognized her talent before his 1912 death; she married veteran Kansas journalist Joseph Blackburn Bass in 1914, and the couple had no children of their own but were close to her nephew, John Kinloch, who also worked at the paper. Widowed in 1934, she continued running the Eagle alone, remaining politically active into her final years by running a community reading room and voter registration site out of her Elsinore, California, garage; she published her memoir, Forty Years: Memoirs from the Pages of a Newspaper, in 1960, suffered a stroke in 1966, and died April 12, 1969.
Sources
- National Park Service; Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County; Los Angeles Urban League
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