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The career of Charlotta Bass, publisher of the groundbreaking African-American newspaper the California Eagle, is chronicled through photographs, letters and memorabilia.
Charlotta Bass held many titles in her lifetime. She was a journalist, newspaper publisher, political candidate and social activist.
Fiercely committed to the common good, she was also branded a communist.
The FBI even placed her under surveillance on the charge that her publication – the ground-breaking California Eagle – was seditious.
Whether she was writing editorials demanding the hiring of black women in war industries, leading protests against segregated housing or calling for world peace, Bass never wavered in her pursuit of justice.
A native of Sumter, S.C., Bass arrived in Southern California in 1910 and began her career selling subscriptions to the California Eagle. Within two years she was promoted to editor and publisher, positions she held for 40 years.
With offices located on Central Avenue, then the heart of Los Angeles’ black community, the newspaper promoted black businesses and the hiring of African Americans in the area, initiating the local “Don't Shop Where You Can’t Work” campaign.
Bass ignited a protest against D.W. Griffith’s 1915 film “The Birth of a Nation,” which glorified the Ku Klux Klan and negatively portrayed African Americans. Black-owned newspapers across the nation responded to the publisher’s call to denounce the film.
“We of the Eagle pioneered in an important field of social struggle,” Bass later wrote, “the struggle to make the film industry responsible morally for the content of its products.”
Bass also aspired to elected office. She ran for Los Angeles city council (1945), Congress (1950) and vice president, sharing the Progressive Party ticket with Vincent Hallinan in 1952.
Her motto in the long-shot vice-presidential campaign was “Win or lose, we win by raising the issues.”
AT&T has made a grant in support of the California Eagle Photo Digitization Project, a one-year joint effort between USC and the Southern California Library to create a searchable digital archive of the California Eagle photograph collection. The collection will be available on the Web this summer.
All items in the exhibition are courtesy of the Southern California Library for Social Studies and Research.
The exhibition is curated by Occidental College’s Regina Freer.
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