Bass compared to major party VP nominees Richard Nixon and John Sparkman
During her acceptance speech with Hallinan
With Hallinan and Paul Robeson
With Robeson
Charlotta Amanda Spears Bass, February 14, 1874 (Sumter, SC) – April 12, 1969 (Los Angeles, Calif.)
VP candidate for Progressive Party (aka Independent Progressive Party) (1952)
Running mate with nominee: Vincent Hallinan (1896–1992)
Popular vote: 140,746 (0.23%)
Electoral vote: 0/531
The campaign:
After being badgered by the FBI and House UnAmerican Activities Committee and watching their 1948 leader Henry Wallace walk out in 1950 due to differences in foreign policy, the Progressive Party experienced a mass exodus in the short time since the previous Presidential election. Wallace came to support the Korean War and many of the more centrist members of the Party were not comfortable with the amount of Communist participation in their organization. By 1952 the Progressive Party was in the control of their Left flank.
For President in 1952, the Progressive Party nominated San Francisco-based attorney Vincent Hallinan who at the time was serving a short prison sentence in McNeil Island, Washington as a contempt of court charge while defending Harry Bridges. When he was released on August 17, 1952, a large crowd of supporters greeted him with a rally at the Steilacoom ferry dock. One of them had a sign that read, "From the Big House to the White House."
The running mate was a historic choice. Charlotta Bass was the first African American woman to be nominated for Vice-President. Her name was placed in nomination by Paul Robeson and seconded by W.E.B. Du Bois.
Sources vary on the date of her birth, but it seems she was 78-years old at the time she was nominated. She was mainly known as the publisher and editor of the California Eagle and used her influence to crusade for civil rights in many forms: racial, housing, labor, and voting as well as highlighting the abuses of police brutality. She was a registered Republican, even a Willkie organizer in 1940, until 1948 when she helped form the Progressive Party.
Most of her career had been made in California, but in 1951 she moved to New York.
Here are some excerpts from her acceptance speech:
I shall tell you how I come to stand here. I am a Negro woman. My people came before the Mayflower. I am more concerned with what is happening to my people in my country than in pouring out money to rebuild a decadent Europe for a new war. We have lived through two wars and seen their promises turn to bitter ashes. Two Negroes were the first Americans to be decorated for bravery in France in World War I, that war that was fought to make the world safe for democracy. But when it ended, we discovered we were making Africa safe for exploitation by the very European powers whose freedom and soil we had defended. And that war was barely over when a Negro soldier, returning to his home in Georgia, was lynched almost before he could take off his uniform. That war was scarcely over before my people were stoned and shot and beaten in a dozen northern cities. The guns were hardly silenced before a reign of terror was unloosed against every minority that fought for a better life.
...
Yes, we fought to end Hitlerism. But less than 7 years after the end of that war, I find men who lead my government paying out my money and your money to support the rebirth of Hitlerism in Germany to make it a willing partner in another war. We thought to destroy Hitlerism—but its germ took root right here. I look about me, at my own people—at all colored peoples all over the world. I see the men who lead my government supporting oppression of the colored peoples of the earth who today reach out for the independence this nation achieved in 1776.
Yes, it is my government that supports the segregation by violence practiced by a Malan in South Africa, sends guns to maintain a bloody French rule in Indo-China, gives money to help the Dutch repress Indonesia, props up Churchill’s rule in the Middle East and over the colored peoples of Africa and Malaya. This week Churchill’s general in Malaya terrorized a whole village for refusing to act as spies for the British, charging these Malyan and Chinese villagers who enjoyed no rights and no privileges—and I quote him literally—“for failing to shoulder the responsibility of citizenship.” But neither the Malayan people—nor the African people who demonstrate on April 6—will take this terror lying down. They are fighting back.
...
I have fought not only for my people. I have fought and will continue to fight unceasingly for the rights and privileges of all people who are oppressed and who are denied their just share of the world’s goods their labor produces. I have walked and will continue to walk in picket lines for the right of all men and women, of all races, to organize for their own protection and advancement. I will continue to cry out against police brutality against any people, as I did in the infamous zoot suit riots in Los Angeles in 1944, when I went into dark alleys and reached scared and badly beaten Negro and Mexican American boys, some of them children, from the clubs and knives of city police. Nor have I hesitated in the face of that most unAmerican Un-American Activities Committee—and I am willing to face it again. And so help me God, I shall continue to tell the truth as I know it and believe it as a progressive citizen and a good American.
...
The Progressive Party in 1952 was endorsed by the American Labor Party and for the second time in a row, the Communist Party USA. When Bass was accused of communist sympathies and "leaning to the Left" she replied, "How can I lean to the left when I am advocating what is right?"
The campaign suffered a blow in early September when newspaper supplement magazine This Week published an anti-Communist anti-Soviet article by Henry Wallace entitled "Where I was Wrong."
On the ballot in 28 states, the Progressive Party had a pretty feeble result especially compared to their 1948 showing. As bad as it was, they still placed third nationally. Best states: New York (0.90%), Maryland (0.81%), Oregon (0.53%), and California (0.46%) and it rapidly declines after that.
The Progressive Party disbanded in 1955. Hallinan was sent back to McNeil Island in 1954 to 1955 on a tax evasion conviction. Bass was considered a "security risk" by the FBI well into her 90s.
But Charlotta Bass had the last word, "Win or lose, we win by raising the issues."
Election history:
1945 - City Council, Los Angeles, Calif. - defeated
1950 - US House of Representatives (Calif.) (Independent Progressive) - defeated
Other occupations: newspaper editor and publisher, western regional director for Wendell Willkie 1940, National Chairman of the Sojourners for Truth and Justice 1952
Buried: Evergreen Cemetery (Los Angeles, Calif.)
Notes:
Buried in the same cemetery as Eddie Anderson, Matthew Beard Jr., and Katherine Grant.
Winner of the 1950 House race was Sam Yorty.
Wrote an autobiography, Forty Years (1960)
Her birth year is sometimes given as 1879 or 1880 and her birthplace as Rhode Island.
First African American woman to serve on a grand jury.
Believed to be the First African American woman to publish a newspaper.
