Charlotta Amanda Spears Bass was the first African-American woman to be nominated for Vice President by a major political party in the United States. She was nominated to be the running mate of Vincent Hallinan for the Progressive Party in 1952.
To read her amazing and powerful speech to the Progressive Party convention, a speech that resonates with so much today, click here.
Born in South Carolina in 1874, she moved to California. She went to work for a newspaper, The California Eagle, selling subscriptions. Charlotta Spears worked her way up to editor, and then purchased the paper at auction for $50, thus becoming perhaps the first African-American woman to own and operate a newspaper in the U.S. In 1912 Joseph Bass was hired as editor, and he and Charlotta were married even as they ran the paper together. As a journalist Charlotta Bass took on issues of police brutality, the Ku Klux Klan, restrictive housing policies, and other forms of systemic racism. She was labeled a “communist” by some, even though she worked for a long time within the Republican Party. The FBI had her under surveillance even until her 90s.
Her husband died in 1934, and she increased her activism. She founded the National Sojourner for Truth and Justice Club to improve the working conditions for Black women. She engaged with both radical and more mainstream groups, ranging from the Universal Negro Improvement Association (founded by Marcus Garvey) to the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People).
In 1940 she was the western regional director for Republican Wendell Wilkie’s presidential campaign. Later in the 40s she left the Republican Party to join Henry Wallace’s Progressive Party. Wallace has served a term as Vice President under President Franklin D. Roosevelt, but he wanted a more progressive party with a strong stand against war and for civil rights. Bass believed neither of the two major parties were doing anything constructive for civil rights, so she joined the Progressive Party. Then in 1952 she was nominated as the Vice Presidential candidate for that party.
She wrote her last column for The California Eagle in April 1951 and then sold the paper. Bass wrote an autobiography titled Forty Years. She moved to New York to focus on political action. She continued her activism until she was slowed down by a stroke in 1966. She moved back to California where she died on April 12, 1969 at the age of 95.