Bass, Charlotta Amanda, 1874-1969

Charlotta Bass, nee Spears, was born on February 14, 1874 in Little Compton, Rhode Island. She attended Brown University, Columbia University and UCLA. At 36 years of age, she moved to Los Angeles and Joined the Eagle later to become the California Eagle. John Neimore was editor and publisher of the Eagle and upon his death in 1912 he left the paper to Charlotta. She soon married Joseph Blackburn Bass from Topeka, Kansas. They became co-editors and publishers of the California Eagle. Mr. Bass died in the early 1930s leaving Charlotta to manage the paper.

Mrs. Bass was an activist who fought against the Ku Klux Klan and racial bias. Her political affiliations were with the Republican Party until 1948 where she had once been the Western Regional Director for Wendell Willkie for the 1940 presidential race. In 1950, Mrs. Bass attended the conferences in Prague, Czechoslovakia on the Defenders of the Peace Committee of the World CONGRESS and subsequently visited the Soviet Union. Mrs. Bass was impressed with the Soviet Union's policies on racial issues and saw it as a model for other countries:

I will never forget the moment when I first realized, standing there in the great Georgian University, that there is in very truth not even a semblance of racial exclusiveness in Russia.

The example which the Russians are setting in this field will have an effect in every country in the world, including our own. (p. 171 Bass, Forty Years).

Mrs. Bass joined the Progressive Party and ran for Congress in 1950 for the Fourteenth District in California. In 1952, she was selected to run for Vice-President on the Progressive Party ticket.

In 1960, Charlotta Bass published her book Forty Years: Memoirs from The Pages of A Newspaper. The book shows the relationship between the California Eagle and the community which it served. It is incidentally an autobiography of Mrs. Bass. The book is a study of local social history and is concerned with the struggle against discrimination in the workplace and in the community.

In the 1950s, Mrs. Bass retired from the paper and subsequently moved to Elsinore, California where she developed the Community Reading Room on Black and Jewish history.

At the age of 95, Mrs. Bass died April 12, 1968.