CHARLOTTA BASS AND THE CALIFORNIA EAGLE
by: Todd Steven Burroughs
"When a person, an organization, even a newspaper gets the courage and fortitude that it is going to require to put this old world in such condition that it will be fit and happy abode for all people, they must be prepared to have their heads cracked, their hopes frustrated, and their financial strength weakened."
-- Charlotta Bass, editor and publisher, The California Eagle, in her column "On The Sidewalk," Jan. 31, 1946
Charlotta Spears (she later married her business partner, Joseph Blackburn Bass) kept a promise, and it caused her to experience most of what she describes above.
The promise was made to J.J. Neimore, The Eagle's founder. The promise was to keep The Eagle in the air, even though much of it was on the auction block. It had been a hard road from its founding in 1879.
Black press historian Phillip Jeter points out that when Neimore died in 1912, "Los Angeles' Black population was approaching 8,000 with an adult illiteracy rate of less than five percent--a substantial development from the dusty pueblo he found when he arrived in the late 1870s."
The time was right--for Bass, for The Eagle, for Negro California. She remained publisher until 1951, building a career in radicalized advocacy journalism.
"From her beginning days as publisher, Bass' Eagle was an advocate," said Jeter. "Bass, in her biography, took credit for getting Blacks hired to work at the Boulder Dam, the Los Angeles County General Hospital and the telephone companies." She also was outspoken in her denunciation of the film "The Birth of a Nation," D.W. Griffith's 1915 racist classic.
In addition, Black press historian Clint Wilson II points out, Bass updated the paper's printing equipment.
The Bass period of Eagle ownership was filled with drama. The death of her husband in the 1930s and a beloved nephew in the 1940s, were emotional body-blows. Jeter writes that bills from companies, including the Associated Negro Press, would often be not paid on time. Add to that the former Garveyite's leftist political involvement, and the FBI surveillance and Post Office Department investigations because of The Eagle's outspokenness during World War II, and the mix was set for McCarthyist Red-bating.
Bass sold the paper in 1951, several years after joining the Progressive Party. She became the party's 1950 congressional nominee. Two years later, she became the first Black woman to run for Vice President when she won the party's 1952 nomination for that office.
Bass died in 1969, four years after The Eagle fell to the ground.
Jeter writes The Eagle served "as the training ground for publishers of two other Black newspapers, one of which--The Los Angeles Sentinel--still survives."
So does the legacy of a militant race fighter--in Black journalism and radical politics.
|
