| Notes |
- Bass Clan Together
In recognition of Mr. and Mrs. Edward Bass, of Topeka, Kansas, who are spending their two weeksâ?? vacation visiting relatives and friends in Los Angeles, twelve members of the Bass Clan were dinner guests of Mrs. Charlotta A. Bass, widow of the late Joseph B. Bass, last Friday evening. In spite of the late season for turkey, the guests enjoyed a turkey dinner with all the trimmings.
The evening was spent reminiscing, reviewing the changes and happenings of the past forty years for the older members of the group since they first came west, and bringing the younger members up to date on the history and background of their predecessors.
It was a happy occasion for: Nazimoa Bircher, 6020 1/4 South Main Street; Oda Bass Austin, 6020 1/4 South Main Street; Marie Isaacs, 4319 Woodlawn Avenue; Geneva Bass Daniel, principal of one of the Los Angeles city schools, 2139 Wellington Road; Beulah Bass, 820 East 25th Street; Odelle Sanders, 820 East 25th Street; Dora Bass Gamble, 1912 Cotner Avenue, West Angeles; Mr. and Mrs. Edward Bass, 814 North Harrison, Topeka, Kansas; and Mr. and Mrs. Wilson J. Sellers, 1912 Cotner Avenue, West Los Angeles.
Mrs. Sellers is the daughter of Mrs. Dora Bass Gamble, and is Grand Worthy Patron of the Court of Calanthe.
Black History Archives
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March 21 at 10:35?PM
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A 91-year-old Black woman. In a nursing home. And the FBI was STILL watching her. Charlotta Bass scared this country so bad they surveilled her until the day she died.
There is a grave in Evergreen Cemetery, in Boyle Heights, on the east side of Los Angeles. The marker bears one name: Joseph Blackburn Bass.
His wife is buried beside him. Her name is not on the stone.
Charlotta Bass spent forty years putting names into print that the rest of the country tried to leave out. She documented the dead, the beaten, the cheated, the erased, every last one of them by name, in black ink, on cheap newsprint, week after week.
When she died in 1969, the woman who made sure nobody else disappeared was allowed to vanish from her own grave. That is the kind of silence she spent her whole life fighting.
She was born Charlotta Amanda Spears on February 14, 1874, the sixth of eleven children in Sumter, South Carolina. Her father, Hiram, was a brick mason.
By the time she was twenty, Charlotta had moved to Providence, Rhode Island, to live with her older brother Ellis, who ran two restaurants and an ice delivery business. She enrolled for a semester at Pembroke College, the women's college at Brown University.
But it was the Providence Watchman, a Black newspaper where she sold ads and subscriptions, that showed her what a printing press could do in the right hands. She stayed ten years and learned the machinery of the business from the inside.
Then her body started to fail her. Asthma and arthritis ground her down, and a doctor told her to go somewhere warm.
In 1910, at thirty-six years old, Charlotta Spears boarded a train for Los Angeles. She arrived in a city that was swelling at the seams.
Black families were flooding west, chasing the promise of jobs and open land and air that did not smell like the Jim Crow South. Los Angeles had its own cruelties, but they were dressed up nicer, tucked behind restrictive covenants and polite silences instead of posted on courthouse doors.
Within weeks of arriving, she found her way to a small Black newspaper called The Eagle, founded in 1879 by a man named John Neimore. Her first job was selling subscriptions door to door for five dollars a week.
Neimore saw something in her. Charlotta saw something in the paper.
When Neimore fell terminally ill in 1912, he called Charlotta to his bedside. He told her he was dying and that he did not want The Eagle to die with him.
He asked her to promise that she would keep it going. She promised.
Two months later, she bought the paper at public auction for fifty dollars borrowed from a local storeowner. She was one of the first Black women in the country to own and operate a newspaper.
She later wrote about the moment with disbelief still clinging to the words. "Almost overnight, I became owner, editor and publisher," she recalled.
"Who had ever heard of a woman running a newspaper?" she asked. It was the talk of the town.
She renamed it the California Eagle. Then she got to work.
In 1913, she hired a veteran journalist from Kansas named Joseph Blackburn Bass, who had cofounded the Topeka Plaindealer. She brought him on as editor while she held the title of managing editor.
The following year, they married. They had no children.
The newspaper was the thing they raised together. Under their partnership, the California Eagle grew from a four-page tabloid into a twenty-page weekly.
By the mid-1920s, it employed twelve workers. By the 1930s, it had a circulation of nearly 60,000, the largest of any Black newspaper on the West Coast.
But circulation numbers do not tell you what the paper actually did. The California Eagle did not print community calendars and church announcements and look away from everything else.
It named the people, the policies, and the institutions responsible for the suffering of Black Los Angeles. It did so in headlines that refused to whisper.
When D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation premiered in Los Angeles in 1915, glorifying the Ku Klux Klan and depicting Black Americans as subhuman threats, Charlotta turned the full force of her paper against it. The California Eagle published editorials calling for the film's suppression, joining a chorus of Black newspapers nationwide that eventually succeeded in having it banned in several cities.
That campaign made enemies. It was supposed to.
By the 1920s, the Klan had embedded itself deeply in Southern California. Charlotta published articles exposing their recruitment drives, their rallies, their plans, with a regularity that made it personal.
In 1925, the California Eagle obtained and published a letter signed by G.W. Price, the head of the Klan in California. The letter outlined a plot to remove Los Angeles's most effective Black leaders by staging traffic accidents, planting liquor in their cars, and having them convicted of driving while intoxicated.
It was not rumor. It was the Klan's own handwriting.
Price sued Charlotta for libel. He offered to drop the charges if she would publicly agree the letter was a fraud.
She declined. The case went to trial in an all-white courtroom.
She faced up to a year in prison and five thousand dollars in damages. She won.
But humiliation does not make power disappear. It makes it meaner.
The threats came faster after the trial. Phone calls, letters, warnings.
One night, someone painted the letters KKK on the sidewalk outside the California Eagle's office on Central Avenue. Charlotta reported it to the police chief, and the chief refused to act.
Then came the night that everyone who tells this story eventually gets to, because it is the kind of moment that sounds like legend but is not. Charlotta was working alone in the office, a large storefront space with a full plate glass window facing the street.
She was visible to anyone walking by. Eight men in Klan robes appeared outside the window, pulled at the door, and demanded to be let in.
She described what happened next in her own words, writing about herself in the third person, as she sometimes did. She said she was bewildered at first, but then she remembered the gun in the desk.
She walked over, picked it up, and looked toward the window. She had never held a gun before.
She was not sure which end to point at them. But the eight men did not know that, and when she raised it, all eight of them ran.
There is something in that detail that the mythologized version of the story always leaves out. Every retelling makes Charlotta sound like an action hero, a woman who calmly drew a weapon and stood her ground against the Klan.
The truth is stranger and more human than that. She did not know how to hold the gun, and the only thing between her and eight men in white robes was a pistol she had never touched and the nerve to pick it up anyway.
Her husband, Joseph, had a line he would repeat. "Mrs. Bass, one of these days you are going to get me killed."
She always gave him the same answer. "Mr. Bass, it will be in a good cause."
But the gun is not the most interesting thing about Charlotta Bass. The gun is the moment people remember because it is dramatic and fast, and because Americans love stories about weapons more than they love stories about work.
The real weapon Charlotta Bass used for forty years was slower and heavier and harder to lift, and it never ran out of ammunition. The California Eagle ran front-page stories exposing police violence with headlines designed to make people stop, headlines like "Trigger-Happy Cop Freed After Slaying Youth."
The paper mapped housing discrimination, showing readers which streets they were forbidden to live on and who had forbidden them. It published the names of employers who would not hire Black workers.
In 1917, Charlotta went after the Los Angeles Fire Department. Black men could take the civil service exam, but the department had never hired one.
She wrote an editorial that still cuts: "The city of Los Angeles does not ask the color of a man's skin when it presents its tax bill." Three months later, the city hired its first Black fireman.
In the 1930s, after Joseph's death in 1934, Charlotta brought the "Don't Spend Where You Can't Work" campaign to Los Angeles. The idea had started in Chicago, a simple and devastating principle: if a business would not hire Black workers, Black customers would stop giving it their money.
When the Southern California Telephone Company refused to hire Black employees, Charlotta organized a response. She convinced one hundred Black subscribers to cancel their service, each one sending a letter citing the company's whites-only hiring policy as the reason.
One hundred cancellations arrived. The company changed its practice.
She did not wait for legislation. She built the pressure herself.
In 1926, she had already founded the Industrial Council of Los Angeles to fight job discrimination, serving as its first president. In 1945, she cofounded the Home Owners Protective Association and challenged racially restrictive housing covenants in court.
She lived in the Sugar Hill neighborhood of West Adams, alongside prominent Black Angelenos like Ethel Waters and Hattie McDaniel, in one of the only areas where Black homeownership was tolerated. Her legal fights against those covenants helped establish the groundwork that informed the Supreme Court's 1948 ruling in Shelley v. Kraemer.
She served on the executive board of the Los Angeles NAACP. She was co-president of the local division of Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association.
She founded the National Sojourners for Truth and Justice, an organization focused on improving conditions for Black women. Every one of these organizations served the same purpose the newspaper did, which was to make it impossible to pretend that what was happening was not happening.
By the late 1930s, the FBI had taken notice. They placed the California Eagle under surveillance, accusing it of being seditious.
During World War II, the Department of Justice interrogated Charlotta over allegations that the paper was funded by Japan and Germany. In 1943, the Post Office Department attempted to revoke her mailing permit.
In 1950, she was hauled before the California Legislature's Joint Fact-Finding Committee on Un-American Activities and accused of being a Communist. There was no evidence, and she denied it repeatedly.
But the accusation alone was designed to do damage, and it did. Her ability to sell the paper and hold her community together under suspicion began to fray.
On April 26, 1951, Charlotta Bass wrote her last column for the California Eagle and sold the paper to Loren Miller, a civil rights attorney who had been a writer and editor there. The Eagle continued publication until 1964.
But Charlotta was not finished. In 1952, at seventy-eight years old, she accepted the Progressive Party's nomination for Vice President of the United States, running alongside California attorney Vincent Hallinan.
She was the first Black woman ever nominated for national office in America. She had no illusions about winning.
Their platform called for civil rights, jobs, housing, and an end to the Korean War. They received less than one percent of the popular vote.
Her slogan told you everything about how she understood power. "Win or lose," she said, "we win by raising the issues."
The campaign worsened her arthritis, and on doctor's orders, she retired to Lake Elsinore, California. She wrote her memoir, Forty Years: Memoirs from the Pages of a Newspaper, published in 1960.
But retirement for Charlotta Bass meant something different than it means for most people. She converted her garage into a community reading room and voter registration site.
She spoke to civic groups. She joined protests against South African apartheid and advocated for prisoners' rights.
In 1966, she suffered a stroke and was moved to a nursing home. In 1967, when she was ninety-one years old, the FBI still classified her as "potentially dangerous."
A ninety-one-year-old Black woman in a nursing home, and the federal government was still afraid of her. That tells you everything.
She died on April 12, 1969, of a cerebral hemorrhage. She was ninety-five.
She was inducted into the California Newspaper Hall of Fame in 2017, nearly fifty years after her death. When Kamala Harris was elected the first Black woman to hold the vice presidency in 2020, Charlotta Bass's name was barely mentioned in the national conversation, even though she had been the first Black woman to run for it sixty-eight years earlier.
And she lies in Evergreen Cemetery, next to the man she loved and built a newspaper with, under a stone that does not carry her name. It is a small erasure, a clerical kind, the kind that happens when no one is paying attention.
But it is the exact kind of erasure she spent her life fighting. The kind that happens quietly, when the people who should be remembered are simply left off the record, not with malice but with indifference, which is sometimes worse.
Charlotta Bass spent forty years making sure the names of the beaten and the cheated and the locked-out were written down where someone could find them. She turned a four-page tabloid into the largest Black newspaper on the West Coast.
She stared down the Klan with a gun she did not know how to use. She organized boycotts that forced telephone companies to change their hiring.
She fought housing covenants that locked Black families out of their own city. She ran for the second-highest office in the land when no one thought a Black woman could.
And the grave does not say her name. Somebody should fix that.
But then again, she already did, didn't she? Not on a headstone, but on forty years of front pages.
In sixty thousand copies a week, carried into sixty thousand homes, read at sixty thousand kitchen tables, where the people the rest of the country refused to see could find themselves, by name, in print. That is the record that matters, the one nobody can take off the stone.
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Bassett Family Association Database
1874 - 1969 (95 years)