"Charlotta Bass"(February 14,1874-April 12,1969)

Was an American educator, newspaper publisher-editor,and civil rights activist.She was probably the first African American woman to own and operate a newspaper in the United States;she published the California Eagle from 1912 until 1951.In 1952 she became the African American woman nominated for Vice President,as a candidate of the Progressive Party.She was born Charlotta Spears in Sumter,South Carolina,the sixth of eleven children of Hiram Spears, a brick mason,and his wife,Kate, a housewife.She moved to Rhode Island after high school and began working in the newspaper business.In 1910 She moved to Los Angeles California to improve her health.Soon after arriving in the city, she took a job selling subscriptions to the small African-American newspaper the California Owl.Just before the owner John J.Neimore died in 1912,he asked Charlotta to take over the paper.Changing the name to the California Eagle,Charlotta hired Joseph Blackburn Bass in 1913 She eventually promoted him as the editor of the paper.She and Joseph married in 1914.After he died in 1934,Charlotta took a more direct role as editor.By 1925,the California Eagle employed a staff of twelve and published twenty pages a week.The Eagle's circulation of 60,000 made it the largest African-American newspaper on the West Coast.As editor and published of the California Eagle,the oldest black newspaper on the West Coast,she fought against restrictive covenants in housing and segregated schools in Los Angeles.She also campaigned to end job discrimination at the Los Angeles General Hospital,the Los Angeles Rapid Transit Company,and the Boulder Dam Project.Charlotta was co-president of the Los Angeles division of Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association  during the early 1920's.During the Great Depression of the 1930's ,she continued to encourage black businesses with the campaign known as "Don't Buy Where You Can't Work."In 1943,she led a group of black leaders to the office of the Mayor of Los Angeles,Fletcher Bowron's office.They demanded an expansion of the Mayor's Committee on American Unity,more public mass meetings to promote interracial unity,and an end to the discriminatory hiring practices of the privately owned Los Angeles Railway Company.The Mayor listened,but agreed to do no more than to expand hos committee.Charlotta was the director of the Youth Movement of the NAACP.The Youth NAACP had 200 members,including some actors and actresses, such as Lena Horne,Hattie McDaniel,and Louise Beavers.She also served in 1952 as the National Chairman of the Sojourners for Truth and Justice, an organization of black women set up to protest racial violence in the South.After years as a registered Republican,she left the party in 1948.In the Progressive Party presidential campaign of 1952,she was the running mate of lawyer Vincent Hallinan.Charlotta wrote her last column for the California Eagle on April 26, 1951,and sold the paper soon after.Considering the sum of her career as she was completing her autobiography Forty Years (1960),she wrote:"It has been a good life that i have had,through,a very had one,but i know the future will be even better,And as i think back i know is the only kind of life.serving one's fellow man serves himself best...