In addition to using the California Eagle to inform and organize the
community, Charlotta Bass actually participated in politics as an appointee to the
Los Angeles County Grand Jury and as a candidate for elected office.
Viewing the formal political arena as a vehicle to pursue her own activist
causes, Bass used her 1943 selection as the first black woman to serve on the Los
Angeles County Grand Jury to fight discrimination in the justice system. In one
instance she admonished her fellow jurors for unfairly stereotyping Mexican Americans
as being predisposed to commit crimes. Bass's willingness to use her access to power
on behalf of other groups reflected a broad commitment to racial justice and coalition
building.
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| Charlotta Bass and other Progressive Party candidates
during the presidential campaign of 1952. |
In 1945 Bass was nominated by the NAACP Emergency Committee to run for the non-partisan
city council race in the 7th district. Called the "People's Unity Candidate," Bass focused
her campaign on the need for fair and adequate housing, improved public health services,
and additional recreation and child-care facilities. Though she was threatened by the Ku
Klux Klan who supported an opponent, Bass refused to withdraw from the race and received
enough votes to force the incumbent, Carl Rasmussen, into a run-off. While she lost the
run-off election, Bass and her supporters viewed the campaign as an important platform to
insert social justice causes into city-wide elections and to launch future electoral victories
for black candidates.
A long-time member of the Republican Party, Bass eventually became disillusioned with the two political parties.
In 1947, she helped to create a third party, the Independent Progressive
Party of California, part of the national Progressive Party, and
served on the IPP executive board. In 1948, she campaigned heavily for and
helped nominate Henry Wallace, the national Progressive Party candidate
for president of the United States. Bass ran again for elective
office in 1950 as a candidate for Congress from Los Angeles on the
Progressive Party ticket. Bass entered the race late, but ran a vigorous campaign
with a platform that again focused attention on issues such as housing
segregation and world peace. She ran against Sam Yorty, later to
become mayor of Los Angeles.
Bass's eventual loss in this race did not deter her from accepting
the Progressive Party's 1952 nomination to run for Vice President
of the United States. (See her acceptance
speech (PDF).) Nominated by Paul Robeson, with W.E.B. DuBois seconding
the nomination, Bass served as the running mate for Vincent Hallinan,
the Progressive Party's presidential candidate. Perhaps the first
black woman to run for this office, in her seventies at the time,
Bass maintained a campaign schedule that often took her to a different
city everyday. Recognizing that the third party ticket had little
hope of winning, the campaign adopted the slogan, "Win or Lose, We
Win by Raising the Issues." This sentiment conveys how Bass thought
about electoral politics and foreshadows today's debates over the
wisdom of third party politics.
A pioneering candidate and political appointee, Bass used electoral politics as another
of her numerous, pathbreaking strategies for pursuing justice and equality.
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