Charlotta Bass - Expansion of Paper

Expansion of Paper

The Eagle developed a large black readership. 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.

When the editor John Neimore become ill, he turned the operations of the Eagle over to Spears. After Neimore's death, the paper’s new owner put Spears in charge. She renamed the newspaper company to the California Eagle due to increasing social and political issues. Her purpose for the California Eagle was to write about the wrongs of society. The newspaper served as a source of both information and inspiration for the black community, which was often ignored or negatively portrayed by the predominant white press. As publisher, Bass was committed to producing a quality periodical. In her weekly column, "On the Sidewalk," begun in 1927, she drew attention to unjust social and political conditions for all Los Angeles minority communities and campaigned vigorously for reform.

Bass published the California Eagle from 1912 until 1951. Bass and her husband combated such issues as the derogatory images in D.W. Griffith's film, Birth of A Nation; Los Angeles' discriminatory hiring practices; the revival of the Ku Klux Klan; police brutality; and restrictive housing covenants. The Basses powerfully championed the black soldiers of the Twenty-Fourth Infantry who were unjustly sentenced in the 1917 Houston race riot. They also covered the case and supported the “Scottsboro boy,” nine young men who were framed and convicted of rape in Scottsboro, Alabama in 1931.

In 1934, Joseph Bass died. Charlotta Bass continued to run the California Eagle on her own.

In the 1940s, Bass's newspaper pioneered multiethnic politics, advocating Asian-American and Mexican-American civil rights.

Bass retired from the newspaper business in 1951. Her later years were devoted to politics.