S1 • E26 Aug 26, 2020 12m
Charlotta Spears Bass (1874-1969), a crusading newspaper editor and politician, was one of the first African American women to own and operate a newspaper in the United States. At a time when newsrooms were male-dominated and few white journalists focused on issues of importance to African Americans, Bass followed in the tradition of 'muckraking' or reform-minded journalism, publishing the California Eagle in Los Angeles from 1912 until 1951. With the largest circulation of any Black paper on the West Coast, the Eagle addressed social and political issues such as racial violence and discrimination in schools, housing and the job market. Bass personally confronted the Ku Klux Klan, and later in her career entered electoral politics, becoming the first African American women to run for Vice President of the United States in 1952, on the Progressive Party ticket. Interviewees: historian Susan D. Anderson, history curator at the California African American Museum; Nikole-Hannah-Jones, Pulitzer Prize winning reporter for The New York Times Magazine, creator of the 1619 Project, and co-founder of the Ida B. Wells Society for Investigative Reporting.
