L.A. Race Woman: Charlotta Bass and the Complexities of Black Political Development in Los Angeles

Using her platform as owner and editor of Los Angeles's prominent black newspaper the California Eagle from 1912-1951, L.A. race woman Charlotta Bass was at the center of black political life of the city. This article examines her life and political activism as they offer a lens into the history of black community response to the particular demography, geography, politics and economics of Los Angeles and African American's expectations of what life should be like in the city. While black Angelenos confronted pitched job market competition and familiar white resistance to black advancement, blacks in L.A. did experience a form of refracted racism; they had unprecedented home ownership levels, racist violence was much less common than it was in the South, and the presence of other people of color meant white racism was not solely directed at the black community. But even while they recognized these relatively favorable circumstances, blacks in L.A. were not complacent; rather they used these circumstances to develop unique, aggressive forms of civil rights activism. Access to L.A.'s version of the American Dream was a central goal for black Angelenos. Though conditions and priorities changed over time, African Americans in the city consistently measured their success more by their relative position to white Angelenos than by comparing their condition to blacks elsewhere. They combined ideologies that elsewhere competed, chose multifaceted allies in their struggle and demanded access to opportunities that blacks elsewhere did not expect to enjoy. While popular and scholarly perspectives regularly truncate L.A.'s black history by locating its birth with the Watt's riots of 1965 and circumscribe black history making to such expressions of hopelessness, political struggle like that practiced by Bass and other black Angelenos signals hope as much as it does frustration. Her life offers a path to a richer understanding of the sunshine and noir of black political development in Los Angeles prior to 1965 and helps us to identify the city as a site of historical political resistance.