Not just along Central Avenue, but throughout...

Not just along Central Avenue, but throughout the city, people knew Charlotta Bass.

For more than 50 years, she defended and taught and shaped Los Angeles’ growing black community.

The pioneering African-American journalist, who became a labor activist and the Progressive Party’s candidate for vice president of the United States, arrived in Los Angeles in 1910, destined to become the editor of the California Eagle, the West Coast’s oldest black newspaper.

She was 36 years old and came to Los Angeles from Rhode Island. The job she found--and it would shape her career--was as a papergirl, collecting and selling subscriptions to a small black newspaper. The paper, named the Advocate, had been founded by John J. Neimore in 1879.

Charlotta Spears was soon promoted to helping Neimore in the office for $5 a week. And within two years of arriving in Los Angeles, she found herself at the helm of the newspaper.

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Neimore died in 1912. The newspaper went on the auction block as Spears stood by, too poor to bid. A neighbor, a secondhand store dealer, saw her anxiety. “If I buy it for you, do you think you can earn enough to (re)pay me?� he asked.

Spears said yes. The neighbor bought it with a $50 bid and handed over the deed. With assets consisting of printing presses and $10, Spears began her long career with vision, courage and perseverance--and $150 in overdue bills.

The same year, Spears changed the paper’s name and her own. The Advocate became the California Eagle, and she became Charlotta Bass, marrying Joseph B. Bass, a founder of the Topeka Plaindealer, who had been caught up in the urge to “go West.�

This new team plunged right in, beginning their fearless campaign against segregation and discrimination in Los Angeles.

In 1914, Bass tried but failed to halt the making of D.W. Griffith’s film “The Birth of a Nation,� which glorifies the Ku Klux Klan. But she forced Griffith to cut some offensive scenes.

As World War I was raging two years later, Bass launched her own fight--this time for fairer voting rights.

In the November, 1916, election, she noticed a tab on the right-hand corner of each ballot with instructions that said, “Tear off if the voter is a Negro.� Black Election Board members refused, and no such tabs appeared again on Los Angeles ballots.

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Racism showed itself on many fronts, and in 1925, after the Eagle printed a letter exposing KKK plans to take over Watts, the Knights of the White Camellia sued the paper for libel.

More than two months later, on June 25, in a crowded courtroom, the California Eagle, circulation about 12,000, beat the Klan and the libel charge. Soon, Bass began getting anonymous, insulting phone calls. And late one evening, eight white-hooded men showed up at her office. They cut their visit short when she pulled a gun out of a desk drawer and aimed it at them.

By 1938, the Eagle was extending its reach, taking its message to the airwaves on a newspaper of the air. Its columns about sports, drama and opinion were heard six nights a week on station KGFJ.

On the eve of World War II, Bass and the Eagle began a campaign against restrictive housing covenants, part of the common “Jim Crow laws,� and supported black families trying to move into all-white areas. Among them were Henry and Texanna Laws, who in 1936 had bought a house on 92nd Street in Watts, then a mostly white and Latino community.

When the Lawses decided they wanted to live in their own house, they found that the law said they could own it but not live in it. They took the matter to court. After eight years, the case reached the California Supreme Court, which upheld the Lawses’ position--and the California Eagle’s, after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on a similar case. Restrictive real estate covenants became unconstitutional.

Bass was in her 60s one winter day in 1941 when she heard a report of bonfires and mock lynchings at Fremont High School. She went there to cover the incident and found herself counseling the angry students.

�. . . Negroes just can’t go to school with white people any more. They can’t mix,� one student told her.

“Oh, I don’t know,� answered the woman who was walking picket lines to protest segregation in the aircraft industry. “I just can’t make myself believe that you would object to my child going to this school or even living next door to you. I believe we would learn to like each other if we ever really became acquainted.�

When police tried to stop their discussion, a white student protested, “We like this woman; she is giving us good advice.� But police ordered the group to disperse.

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By 1951, Bass had sold the Eagle to pursue new challenges.

She had already served as the first African-American on the Los Angeles County grand jury, and she lost her first political campaign, a City Council race, in 1945.

For 40 years, Bass had supported the Republican Party in her newspaper, but after World War II, her thinking changed, and she joined the new Progressive Party. She lost to future Los Angeles Mayor Sam Yorty in her bid for a congressional seat in 1950, the same year she was labeled a Communist by some for traveling to a peace conference in Czechoslovakia.

She was 78 when she made her last run at politics, as the Progressive candidate for vice president--the first black woman candidate for the office--on the ticket with presidential candidate Vincent Hallinan.

The Eagle folded in 1964, a year after the man who bought it from Bass became a judge. The Eagle’s last home, on Central Avenue, is now an appliance store.

And the woman who made the paper’s reputation died in 1969. She was 95.