Vann, Robert Lee

Impact on the world

As the Courier’s lawyer, treasurer, and eventually editor and publisher from 1910 until his death, Vann built a professional staff, national advertising base, and dedicated printing plant that made the paper, by the late 1930s, the most widely read Black newspaper in America; he hired columnist George Schuyler, also profiled in this collection, in 1925, and secured contributions from W.E.B. Du Bois and Marcus Garvey. His 1932 editorial urging Black voters to turn Abraham Lincoln’s picture to the wall and embrace Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal is credited with accelerating a historic realignment of Black political allegiance, and Vann was rewarded with an appointment as special assistant to the U.S. Attorney General from 1933 to 1935. The Courier under Vann campaigned for the integration of the U.S. military and professional sports, extensively covered the Scottsboro Boys trial and Joe Louis’s boxing career, and laid the institutional groundwork that allowed the paper, under his widow Jessie Matthews Vann’s subsequent 22-year leadership, to reach its peak circulation of over 350,000 during the World War II-era Double V Campaign.

Life & background

Born August 27, 1879, in Ahoskie, North Carolina, to a single mother, Vann graduated valedictorian of Waters Training School in 1901, worked his way through the University of Pittsburgh and its law school, graduating in 1909, and was admitted to the Pennsylvania bar that same year. He became legal counsel for the fledgling Pittsburgh Courier in 1910 and its editor by 1912, building it into a national institution over three decades while also serving in Pittsburgh city government and briefly in the Roosevelt Justice Department; he died of abdominal cancer at his Pittsburgh home on October 24, 1940, at age 61.

Sources

1. BlackPast.org; Washington Times; New Pittsburgh Courier