July 27, 2026 • 49 mins
Margaret talks to Cristen Conger about an organizer who was the first Black American woman to own a newspaper and once scared off the Klan.
Source:
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2007-may-20-op-anderson20-story.html
https://www.npr.org/2021/05/04/993605428/beneath-the-santa-monica-freeway-lies-the-erasure-of-sugar-hill
https://americacomesalive.com/california-eagle-newspaper-black-readership-ahead-time/
https://www.pbs.org/blackpress/news_bios/ca_eagle.html
https://oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/tf6c60052d
The Untold Story of Charlotta Spears Bass, Groundbreaking Politician, Nicole A. Mansfield
https://www.history.com/articles/nat-turner-rebellion-literacy-slavery
https://www.browndailyherald.com/article/2021/02/brown-s-first-black-female-graduate-ethel-robinson-s-legacy-on-college-hill
https://ncph.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/Redlining-and-Racial-Covenants_pdfversion.pdf
https://www.segregationbydesign.com/los-angeles/sugar-hill
https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/progressive-party-platform-1948
https://mutterhood.com/charlotta-bass/
https://www.blackwomenradicals.com/blog-feed/charlotta-spears-bass
https://lamag.com/lahistory/charlotta-bass-kkk/
https://web.archive.org/web/20090819013517/http://www.socallib.org/SCLWebsite/hiseagle.htm
https://www.myblackhistory.net/Charlotta_Bass.htm
https://www.aaihs.org/charlotta-bass-and-the-cold-war-peace-movement/
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zon Media.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Hello, and welcome to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff,
your weekly reminder that when the federal government does terrible
things to people, people can fight back and actually successfully
have long and successful lives of doing incredible activism. I'm
your host, Margaret Kiljoy, and this week on the show,
my guest is Kristen Conger. Hi. How are you? Hi?
Speaker 3 (00:25):
I'm great, so happy to be here.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
You are the host of the podcasts Unladylike and Conspiracy.
She wrote, You are the former host and forever founder
of the podcast stuff Mom Never Told You, which is
how I first heard of you, because it is the
home of one of my all time favorite returning guests,
Samantha McVeigh, So I figured you're probably really cool too, Love.
Speaker 1 (00:45):
Samantha and our dear dear dear dear dear dear dear
dear friend, Bridge Todd.
Speaker 2 (00:50):
That's true, okay, but you are the second Conger we've had. Actually,
I actually don't even know if I've had Molly Conger
on the show, but I just like spiritually have had
Molly Kong on the show. You have okay, great. I
don't remember things. That's kind of my bit to study
a new subject every week. It works out fine for
me anyway. You're the second Conger we got on the show.
(01:12):
What is a conger? Like a Cooper has made barrels?
What does a conger have done?
Speaker 3 (01:17):
As far as I know, conger was a shortened version
from bell conger.
Speaker 2 (01:22):
Oh like you hit bells.
Speaker 3 (01:24):
So I don't know if that meant we made the
bells or just rang the bell. Whoa, that's something to
do with bells. And I'm thinking about, you know, just
reclaiming the bell bell Conger. Maybe I can get Molly
Conger on board. I don't know.
Speaker 2 (01:38):
I love that I have an entire set of tuned
bells in my kitchen where normal people keep their instruments
their dining room.
Speaker 3 (01:47):
I should know how to play them. You know, it's
in my blood.
Speaker 2 (01:51):
Hell yeah. Also on the show is Sophie. Hi, Sophie,
you're a producer.
Speaker 3 (01:56):
Hey, magbye, I'm happy to be here.
Speaker 2 (02:01):
This week. We are on a red Scare kick. I've
been on a red Scare kick for a moment because
it is a thing that includes way too much of
my brain space in my waking life. Because there's a
new red Scare starter, and I thought to myself, why
not take time to look at an anti red scare
activist a principle. I'm going to see if you can
figureut who it is. I have no idea whether you'll
(02:22):
know this person or not, just literally no idea. A
principled woman who seemed constitutionally incapable of backing down from
a fight. She was a pioneering journalist, probably the first
black woman to own a newspaper in the United States,
and certainly the first black woman vice presidential candidate in
US history when she ran for office in nineteen fifty
(02:42):
two on the Progressive Party ticket. It's not a quiz.
I mean, I'm asking if you know, but that's just
literally out of curiosity. I wouldn't have known.
Speaker 3 (02:52):
I wish I knew. She sounds incredible.
Speaker 2 (02:55):
Well, I have good news for you about the next
two hours of your life, because we're going to talk
the one the only Charlotta spears bass and I am
accidentally going to say bass probably several times, and that's
embarrassing because bass looks like bass.
Speaker 1 (03:13):
I really like the name Charlotta.
Speaker 3 (03:15):
I know, yeah, it's a powerful name.
Speaker 2 (03:18):
Charlotta spears bass like coming out the gate, strong name.
She is cool as hell and like can't be as
easily summed up as every like pop history piece that
I read about her. Some of them are really well done,
but she has like a lot of articles written about
her a couple of years ago because of Kamala Harris,
(03:40):
who she has almost nothing in common with besides identity
and being vice presidential candidates or whatever, you know.
Speaker 3 (03:46):
But yeah, my question though, is like, how did I
miss her? It seems like she deserves way more attention.
Speaker 2 (03:52):
I know, I was really surprised because like everything I've
read is like, oh, yeah, everyone knows about this person,
and I'm like, I had never I even know a
lot of the supporting characters in this story, like Marcus
Garvey's and here, Paul Robison's in here. Yeah, and like
also just like specifically, black journalism is a thing that's
(04:13):
really interesting to me, and like the role of newspapers
and social change, because frankly, old timing newspapers were almost
more like modern podcasts than they are like modern newspapers,
because like the line between opinion piece and news was
a lot blurrier, right, Like it is also in our
field of.
Speaker 3 (04:30):
Work, you don't say I try to.
Speaker 2 (04:34):
Tell the truth all the time. It's just my truth
has opinion in it. I straight up don't know how
well known this person is, right, but as is classic
for talking about a black person born in the US South,
maybe maybe the US South Papolios North. She was born
(04:55):
in the nineteenth century, and so I've therefore read contradictory
dates about when she was born and where she was born.
This whole story is going to have more contradictory facts
from seemingly trustworthy sources than I wish it did. There's
like multiple people with like PhDs or pedigrees being like, oh,
blah blah blah this thing, and other people being like
(05:16):
this other thing, and that's just going to be the
way it is.
Speaker 3 (05:20):
Interesting.
Speaker 2 (05:22):
Charlotta Amanda Spears was born on Valentine's Day sometime between
eighteen seventy four and eighteen seventy eight, or why not
maybe eighteen seventy nine or eighteen eighty eighteen seventy four
seems like the most likely. So going to go with it.
I'll probably point out when there's like contradictory stuff, but
overall I'm doing it like this is my best interpretation. Right.
(05:45):
She was the sixth of eleven kids, which is both
a lot of kids and also a oddly or a
normal number for the time. Her mother was Kate Spears.
Her father was Hiram Spears, and he was a brain Claire.
And she was probably born in the bustling city of Sumter,
(06:06):
South Carolina, which is so bustling and I had never
heard of it and I had to look it up.
Speaker 3 (06:10):
I'm like, what, it sounds very Confederacy.
Speaker 2 (06:15):
Oh yeah, no, absolutely, I mean the Confederacy is you know,
dead and gone sort of by this point. But yeah,
Sumter is currently the eighth biggest city in South Carolina,
so it has that going for it. Hell yeah, it's
not a big place. It's also possible she was born
in Little Compton, Rhode Island. I like, how oddly specific
these two places are and very far away from me.
Speaker 3 (06:39):
Yeah, very different settings.
Speaker 2 (06:43):
Yeah, and she's going to move to Rhode Island, but
not to Little Compton. So most sources say South Carolina,
and that's certainly demographically more likely. We're going to talk
about the Great Migration and stuff like that, but that
comes fifty years later, and honestly, she's going to be
part of what causes the Great Migration. By well, I'll
(07:03):
get into it. I just love how like individual figures,
like I hate the great man of history theory, but
instead I love a kind of inverse of that, where
instead of it being an undifferentiated mob and like social
conditions that create change, I love how it's like the
accumulated action of a whole lot of individuals and.
Speaker 3 (07:24):
Groups almost like to be super reductive. It's almost butterfly effectish.
Speaker 2 (07:29):
Yeah, totally, which is why I have my giant red
string board of all of the weird connections between all
of these people, and it keeps me up at night
that I don't know all of these connections, and if
I had a time machine, I would be absurd and
just do it as a weird historian, not try and
make the world better like anything like that, and just
be like, but how'd you know that? Guy?
Speaker 3 (07:50):
Those are the kind of conspiracy theories I think we
need more of the.
Speaker 2 (07:54):
Like small people who accidentally created big change. Yeah, I'm
into that. Most sources issues born in South Carolina. That's
the most likely from my point of view, But the
Rhode Island claim comes from the library that holds all
of her papers, so I'll fucking whatever. What I do
know is that eighteen seventy four to eighteen eighty was
(08:16):
a rough time to be born a black person in
the US South or the US North. The Union had
won the Civil War in eighteen sixty five. I always
have to include as much context as possible, because I
always never know things when I go into things. The
Union had won the Civil War in eighteen sixty five,
which brought legal chattel slavery to a halt in the
US and for about ten years during reconstruction, there was
(08:40):
a flourishing of black economic and political power in the
US South because that's where the overwhelming majority of black
people lived. Black politician after black politician was elected, and
now that it wasn't literally a crime to be literate,
literacy rates among black people were skyrocketing. Like I am
not aware of another moment in time where a group
(09:03):
of people had their literacy rates go up so fast.
Because it's worth underlining here socialisms. We gonna be talking
about a black journalist what a threat black literacy was
to white supremacy. When Nat Turner led a rebellion in
eighteen thirty one that just had the slavers pissing themselves
in fear. Just you can't overestimate how much Nat Turner's
(09:26):
rebellion scared people. Part of what scared people was that
he was literate, he had read the Bible that he preached,
and black sailors from the North were smuggling abolitionist texts
into the South. And in response to Nat Turner's rebellion,
teaching literacy to enslaved people became illegal. So it was like,
now you're like, even the white person can get in
(09:47):
trouble for teaching black people how to read. Before the war,
only about ten percent of enslaved people were literate. By
eighteen seventy, the number was twenty percent. By nineteen ten
it was seventy percent. And so for twelve years you
have this kind of beautiful thing going on, and then
in eighteen seventy seven, federal troops are withdrawn and white
(10:09):
Southern racists reassert their power through Jim Crow laws. And
that's the time period in which Charlotta was born during
a beautiful dream that was shattered by powerful bigots. So
in eighteen ninety four, when she's sixteen or twenty or
(10:30):
fourteen or something, she's young. Yeah, she moved to Rhode Island,
unless she was born there in which case. At this point,
she moved to Providence, Rhode Island.
Speaker 3 (10:42):
Hilarious, and she.
Speaker 2 (10:44):
Went there because her older brother was there. And supposedly,
I'm going to do so many supposedly as in this
and I tried to look all of them up because
I'm weird and obsessive. Supposedly she attended Pembroke College and Providence,
which is part of Brown University, the Ivy League, which
was the women's college that was attached to Brown University.
If this is true, she would have been one of
(11:06):
the very first black women, and it would throw off
a lot of the timelines of what I read. It's
still possible. I still think she did it. I just
think it throws off people's timelines because Pembrook started teaching.
It was just kind of a throwaway fact, like, oh,
and then she went to this Ivy League university as
like a black girl from the South, and I'm like,
I fucking need to know more about that. This is
the eighteen nineties we're talking about, right. Pembrooke started teaching
(11:30):
women in eighteen ninety two. The first black woman admitted
to the college wasn't until until nineteen oh one. Ethel
Tremaine Robinson and she didn't graduate until nineteen oh five,
so Bass could have attended, but not right away, and
that's what I assume happened. I think she did about
a semester there, and this would have been rough. The
(11:51):
teachers and students were racist as hell. I read some
about Ethel Tremaine's experiences there. The teachers and students were
racist as hell. She wouldn't have been allowed to live
on campus with the white women. So she's allowed to
come to class, but she's not allowed to socialize or live,
you know. And there would have been no scholarships available
to her, which is obviously the kind of like systemic
(12:12):
oppression that she's going to spend her entire life fighting against.
I would suspect that her brother paid her way through school.
Ellis Spears was a businessman who had two restaurants and
an ice delivery service to his name, just not nothing.
Speaker 3 (12:31):
I'd love to see those menus.
Speaker 2 (12:33):
Yeah, totally.
Speaker 3 (12:36):
That it was good.
Speaker 2 (12:37):
Well, then we really find out whether he's from South
Carolina or.
Speaker 3 (12:40):
Or an island exactly.
Speaker 2 (12:44):
And so she started her newspaper life while she's in
Providence working for the Providence Watchman, which is a black
newspaper at the time there, and she's selling ads and subscriptions,
which I would like to note is truly a noble pastime,
selling the ads that support media that promote radical ideas,
(13:06):
which is why to carry on in her legacy, I
would like, for once we don't usually do this, to
have products and services that support the show. Interrupted the
podcast and reback. I had no idea how far into this.
I was like almost tried to rework my script so
(13:26):
that that would be at the right time for an
AD break.
Speaker 1 (13:28):
There's no right time for an AD break.
Speaker 2 (13:32):
There's no wrong time for an AD break. So that
was smooth, Thank you, thank you. Although I do think
it's actually kind of it probably brought this up before,
even like the like radical newspapers of the sixties and
seventies were selling ads, and like it's kind of a
thing that people like we kind of whitewashed the radicals
of the past and sort of like anything that doesn't
(13:54):
map to like what we would expect or want them
to do, we tend to try and take out when
we talk about them. So it took me a while.
I was surprised when I was like the young Lord's
like the Puerto Rican radical movement in New York City.
They sold ads in their newspaper. I'm like, oh, yeah, no,
because they wanted to print their newspaper, like they didn't
(14:18):
have big money behind them. The Watchman was a black newspaper,
And if you've heard almost any episode of the show
at about the turn of the century, you know that
newspapers were kind of a big deal at the time.
The podcasts of their time, as I like to call them,
although I also sometimes call other things the podcast at
the time, like street what's the thing where he said
(14:39):
on a soapbox street soapboxers, I'm just gonna call them
the street preaching or yeah no, But there's this kind
of thing where like there's a big thing in the
early twentieth century before Twitter, everyone would be bored, so
they just go out to the park and they'd be
basically like people soapboxing. But soapboxing was kind of a
(15:00):
comedy act because you had to do infotainment. You had
to get across your ideas right, but you had to
do it entertainingly because you have literally other soapboxers all
around the park and you're competing for an audience. So
it's like competitive infotainment comedy.
Speaker 3 (15:15):
Oh god, so it was like proto YouTube.
Speaker 2 (15:18):
Yeah, it wasn't podcasts, it was proto YouTube. That's what
soapboxing was. Your background's like journalist stuff, right, m And like,
I'm curious. I'm just really interested in how journalism shapes
ideas and the way that we like view journalism has
changed so much. The idea of the objective newspaper was
(15:39):
kind of I have always heard basically invented by the
New York Times in order to tell newspapers being like,
ah are the ones who are telling you the truth
and nothing but the truth? You know. I'm just interested
in all that stuff.
Speaker 3 (15:51):
I mean, I won't take you down a full journalism
school tangent, but a full journalism school tangent down that
old dusty road. I actually majored in newspapers, which is
sounds like I majored in like horse and buggies. Yeah yeah,
(16:11):
And it was taught as like a very like you know,
a noble art of objectivity. But maybe it was just
getting sold spon con from the New York Times and
didn't even know it.
Speaker 2 (16:23):
I mean, it's funny, it's like I'll kind of make
fun of that. But like when I was like a journalist,
but I'm going to use air quotes because I was
mostly an activist when I was younger, and I did
a lot of like video reporting on protests and things
like that turn of the millennia. Because I'm ancient. We
always talked about how objectivity is a myth, but we
kind of did that to like defend our own like
(16:45):
utter lack of objectivity. And I eventually was like, objectivity
is kind of a myth, but we should still kind
of strive for a lot of things that are mythical,
you know, Like I want to tell you the truth
when I tell you this story about someone that I
think is cool, and I also want to be really
upfront about my biases so that you can analyze what
(17:05):
I'm saying and say, like, all right, well Margaret thinks
that because she thinks the following things, right. But I'm
still going to try, you know.
Speaker 3 (17:13):
Yeah, I think I've philosophically like shifted away from, like
you said, like accepting the myth of objectivity, maybe still
striving for it, but really like I strive to give
the context at the very least. Yeah, Yeah, totally, people
can hang on to.
Speaker 2 (17:30):
Yeah, that's like, the only way I can care about
history is once I understand the things around it, like
a series of like individual incidents, names and dates and stuff.
Speaker 3 (17:39):
Oh yeah, timeline.
Speaker 2 (17:40):
No, yeah, no, that's never gonna I only start caring
about timeline once I've studied so many things in a
general area that I can start being like, oh shit,
that happened in nineteen sixty four. Then that means the
following thing, you know, mm hmm. But like that's not
where I'm starting, and that's not where I expect the
audience to start. That's why I like my podcasts is
that they admit that also, our goal is to keep
(18:02):
people entertained, which is why I'm sure this meta conversation
is totally entertaining to you, the listener. And so though
these black newspapers all over the country, and it's a
really important part of the network of emancipation that people
are building of liberation, like literally one of them is
called the Liberator, although that one is funny, I think,
(18:23):
oh lord, that one actually was in the eighteen sixties
and it was actually run by a white man, but
it was considered a black newspaper because all of its
readership was black. And most of the people doing the
other stuff were black, but it was being financed by
a like rich white abolitionist. One day, I'm going to
do more about The Liberator. I only read a paragraph
about it while doing this episode, and then I didn't
put it in the script. Anyway, she worked not for
(18:44):
the Liberator. She worked for the Watchman, which is a
good name for a paper. They had cool names for
papers back then. Soon we're going to talk about a
paper called the Owl, and I'm really into it. So
she worked for ten years for this place, and I
can't find too much information about that specific paper, which
makes me sad. But Charlotta Bass wasn't thriving in Providence.
(19:06):
It was cold and it was humid, and she had
asthma and arthritis, which is going to make her career
as a writer extra impressive, I must say, because not
a time of keyboards that are easy on the joints.
So she said, what if I go where it's warm
and dry? What if I moved to a city you
all might have ever heard of, Los Angeles, California, So
(19:28):
ify that one's for you, because I know you like
Los Angeles, California.
Speaker 1 (19:32):
Yeah, born and raised baby, This is a whole story
about your city. It's literally the shortest section in the
script Los Angeles, the California section.
Speaker 2 (19:45):
Oh, but I'm going to be talking about a whole
neighborhood that used to exist. I'm going to talk about
the red lining. I'm going to talk about the Highway ten,
which is a highway that I totally know. It is freeway.
It's the tenth one. It's the tenth Freeway.
Speaker 1 (19:58):
We don't have highways. They're free with.
Speaker 2 (20:00):
Okay, are you Caddy Corner or Kitty Corner?
Speaker 1 (20:04):
I'm Kitty Corner.
Speaker 2 (20:05):
What about you, Kristen? What's where you're at?
Speaker 3 (20:08):
I'm Caddy Corner. I'm so sorry, I've got to leave
this zoom.
Speaker 2 (20:13):
I think I'm Caddy Corner. No, I'm Kitty Corner. I
grew up on those maps. I grew up on the
one where we don't have a name for this. It's
what I grew up with.
Speaker 3 (20:23):
It's okay.
Speaker 1 (20:24):
I get outed as being from California and Oregon all
the time because in California we call freeways like it
would be like the five, Yeah, the four or five,
and they don't do that here, and they're like, it's
the I five and you get judged for being interesting.
Speaker 2 (20:43):
I wrote a story where the characters go down I
five and I said, like, they went down the five,
or maybe I said went down the I five. And
my Oregon editor was like, we don't call that here,
and I'm like, I lived there for six years. I've
hitchhiked on that road. It's the only state where you're
allowed to. I feel as though I can call it this.
(21:07):
This is totally what people are listening to this far.
So Charlotta Bass moves to Los Angeles, California. This is
the very beginning of what's called the Great Migration, when
black people fled the South in incredible numbers. She's not
fleeing the South, she's leaving New England. But there's a
sort of internal diaspora to escape Jim Crow and to
(21:29):
seek out a better life either up north or out west.
And one of the reasons that it was good for
people out west one of the reasons among many, but
one of my little things that butterflied out was a
black newspaper from Los Angeles called The Owl. Yes later
(21:50):
it's going to be called the California Eagle. It has
gone by a bunch of names, and I have seen
it both called the owl, the California Owl, the eagle,
and the California Eagle.
Speaker 3 (22:00):
Love that.
Speaker 2 (22:01):
Yeah, I believe it was called the owl and then
became the eagle, and then became the California Eagle, and
it was never the California Owl. But I don't know,
and I've read all four. But it's a sick name,
the owl. I get really sad when people have the
sick name and they change it to the normal name.
The Eagle's fine, not mad at the eagle rolls off
the tongue a little easier.
Speaker 3 (22:20):
It's a little Republican coded.
Speaker 1 (22:21):
I'm yeah, you're patriotic, exactly exactly.
Speaker 2 (22:24):
CHRISTI yeah, totally.
Speaker 3 (22:27):
Oh.
Speaker 2 (22:27):
I wonder how much that has changed, whether like yeah,
who knows. Anyway, For the last fifty years of the
existence of this paper, which was around for twenty one
and a half confederacies, which is how I measure lengths
of time, for the last fifty years of this paper,
it was the California Eagle. So I'm gonna mostly call
it that, even though it's the least fun of the
three names. The Owl slash California Eagle was established in
(22:49):
eighteen seventy nine, and it lasted until nineteen sixty four,
eighty five years twenty one times the Confederacy. It was
started by a bl black man who'd moved from Texas
to Los Angeles, actually honestly a black kid who moved
from Texas to Los Angeles, John James Neimour, and it
became an important black voice in California. I don't know
(23:12):
as much about him as I would like, but he
was born in Texas to black farmers. That's what everything says.
If he was born in the early eighteen sixties. He
was not born to black farmers. He was born to
black enslaved farm workers. And people love leaving things like
that out of stories. And then somehow or another, he
got himself to California to start a groundbreaking newspaper when
(23:36):
he was sixteen or seventeen years old. Wow, I don't
know what the fuck you were doing when he was
sixteen not that. Yeah, totally wasting time. Yeah, this man
started his life project when he was sixteen or seventeen
years old. And I love these moments of outsized results
for small actions. I can't prove the cause and effect
(23:59):
specifically about the Great Migration in this but John James
Nimore started the OWL specifically to help people leaving the
South to find a new home in California. And since
the Great Migration was one of the most important demographic
shifts in US history, it's had this enormous impact on
US culture, and so on some level, the OWL helped
(24:22):
make that happen. Even though it started thirty years before
the Great Migration, it started making it easier for people
to come out to California. California ended up being I
read a bunch of different quotes and I didn't end
up putting any of them in my script, And I
don't know why. I read a bunch of different quotes
from different thinkers talking about like, look, California is the
nicest place to be black in the United States of America.
Is what people were saying at various points in like
(24:44):
the nineteen tens, nineteen twenties.
Speaker 3 (24:46):
Like any specific reason, like why California Now.
Speaker 2 (24:51):
I think that's why it ended up in the script,
as I was like, that was like one of those
things where I was like, I need to learn more
about that, and I didn't. But I assume Jim Crow
had the least reach. I assume kind of a like
a little bit of like the wild West vibe, but
like with cities, you know, I assume it's the kind
of the combination of those two factors, because the when
(25:13):
sometimes when you're on like the frontier, even though that's
like a land of a lot of racist shit, there's
also like more permissiveness for like breaking social boundaries, right, yes, yeah,
And I've read a lot of like, oh crap, it's
been years since I did this. There was a black
trans woman who ran a brothel and did a whole
bunch of crazy shit out in California and was like
(25:34):
doing all kinds of awesome stuff and I cannot remember
her name or what she did.
Speaker 3 (25:40):
Ah crap, she sounds cool, magpie.
Speaker 1 (25:43):
To be fair, you don't remember most people's names, and
that's fine.
Speaker 2 (25:48):
That's true. I actually, if I spend enough time alone,
every living object that is not me is named Rintraw
after my dog. Yeah, by accident. So I'll like shoe
a spider out of my house and be like, get
out if you're intra and then I'm like, my friends
will come of anyway. I'm totally normal. But yeah, so
California was a place I am suspecting that would be
(26:09):
my guess this combination of like urban living is usually
much better for minorities, but also sometimes frontier societies are
also a place with more permissiveness of social mobility, which
plays really complicatedly into colonialism, right, because a lot of
the colonists, like for example, the Japanese colonists who came
over to Korea and were a horrible colonizing force in
(26:31):
Korea for many years, were the people who couldn't make
it in Japan, and so they were doing something like
edgy and cool by going and becoming colonial assholes in Korea.
And it's like the similar thing that Britain did and
the US did. It's just like a pattern, and so
the frontier is always like a complicated place. That's my
best guess. In eighteen eighty five, LA was only about
(26:53):
one percent black. The two largest minority groups were Chinese
and Japanese, and when people got there they could count
on the OWL to help them find out about housing
and jobs, and I believe it ran also articles specifically
about how to help people find their way in a
new city. I've also seen it described as a paper
that's specifically focused on telling positive stories about black people,
(27:17):
which rules because alongside honest descriptions of the problems of
the world. I think it's well, it's literally my podcast.
It's very important to hold up positive stories as well,
and it was a very short paper. It was a
four page tabloid. I am guessing it came out weekly,
but I could not tell you. Nimour was also involved
in the early years of the first Black Baptist church
(27:38):
anywhere in southern California, Second Baptist, which was found in
eighteen eighty five. I believe it's still around today, as
we've covered a lot in the show, but it's always
worth repeating for context. Black churches were crucial parts of
early Black liberation movements, and so helping getting this thing
going was another rather important accomplishment on his part. This
(27:58):
particular church, Second Baptist W. E. B. Du Bois, spoke there.
He's one of the people who had a quote about
California that I didn't write into the script. The minister's
son was the director of the La ANDAACP MLKA Junior
preached there in nineteen sixty eight, just three weeks before
he was murdered. But unfortunately for the world, Neimour's health
(28:18):
wasn't the best and he died young in nineteen twelve,
at fifty years old. People at the time seemed to
describe it as he worked himself to death. Here is
one of the problems with being a self starting journalist.
Speaker 3 (28:32):
When you start your life's work at sixteen.
Speaker 2 (28:35):
Well, it was like I always thought I was really
lazy as a kid, and it just turns out I
don't like working for other people, but as soon as
I'm in charge of my own thing, I will work
instead of anything that I should be doing for my health.
So Charlotta Bass had been working there for a year
or two at that point. She started by basically when
(28:56):
she first moved to California. I actually think she wasn't
trying to stay there. I think she was trying to
do that thing that like people used to do in
old timing days, where they're like, it's better for my
health to go to a nicer climate, and I'm going
to go there for a couple of years and recover
and then come back, you know. But she was like,
but I'm not a rich person doing that in Victoria
in England, so I need a job. And so she
started working at this newspaper, I believe, selling ads and
(29:19):
presumably subscriptions, and I think maybe became kind of editor
as Nymour got sick. I think it was mostly a
one man show before that, but I am not sure.
It's my inference. And on his deathbed, Nymore extracted a
promise from her to keep his paper alive. Just such
a dramatic scene to imagine, right, But the catch was
(29:44):
he didn't own his newspaper. She bought the paper at
auction for fifty dollars after his death. Niymour didn't own
the paper. A creepy white dude did no. And the
creepy white dude was like, oh, yeah, sure, you can
keep running the paper. You just have to fuck me.
And she was like, I am not going to fuck you.
(30:05):
So instead she went to a Again this is my
inference here, she went to crime and organized fifty dollars
from crime. From a second hand story, I believe she
went to a pawn shop and said, give me a
sketchy business loan, sketchy loan, shark, I would like to
buy this business and they were like, yeah, okay, here's
fifty bucks, which is about seventeen hundred dollars today, and
(30:28):
bought the paper at auction because the guy who owned
it didn't pulled on to it. He didn't give a
shit about it, right, he sold at auction. She bought it.
She didn't have to fuck him, And at thirty six
years old, she became the first black American woman to
own her own newspaper by like being like smart and fierce.
Speaker 3 (30:47):
And that also says something like the extent to which
she is going to carry through this deathbed promise.
Speaker 2 (30:54):
Yeah, she's amazing. Like at some point I think in
the next episode, I think she's going to drive off
eight members of the KKK with a handgun. Hell yeaes
And she buys this newspaper, and local black leaders I
assume these are all men, show up and are like,
(31:14):
you can't do this, and they think they'd be nice
to her. They're like, look, if a man works himself
to death trying to make this work, you shouldn't even try.
I mean for your own health and well being. That
clearly didn't stop her, But do you know what can
stop this story? For approximately four minutes? Good Lord, thank you? Yeah?
(31:37):
Is it less than that? I actually don't remember how
long the ads are. I really hope not two minutes.
I don't know. It's the ads they can stop the
flow of this podcast by are you talking? Andrew Beck?
So now she's trying to run a newspaper all by herself.
That is actually really hard to do. Do you ever
(31:58):
end up actually working in news after you majored in it? No,
I think this is very common.
Speaker 3 (32:05):
I worked at the college newspaper and then yeah, that
was it. Yeah, and then I got into digital.
Speaker 2 (32:12):
Yeah, you're like one of the earlier on the scene podcasters.
Speaker 3 (32:15):
Right, Yeah, I'm a thousand years old.
Speaker 2 (32:19):
Sorry, I'm not trying to I think you're about my age.
I'm not trying to like put you on a spot anywhere.
Speaker 3 (32:24):
And I don't know why I'm blushing. Yes, I've been
podcasting since two thousand and nine, which is too long.
Speaker 2 (32:33):
I hope I make it that long too. I know
that I need help making podcasts. I ran a podcast
all by myself for a while and it sucked. And
that's why I'm glad Sophie is my producer. Hey, and
she was like, I need a Sophie. She was like,
I need someone to run the business side of this.
(32:54):
Even though she knows how to run the business side,
she just doesn't want to do it all by herself,
so she needs a managing editor, so by nineteen thirteen
she recruited a black newspaper man from Kansas with a
also kind of sick name. I think both of these
people have pretty sick names. Joseph Blackburn Bass. And he
ran the Topeka Plane Speaker, which is another sick name
(33:15):
for a newspaper, the plane Speaker. It's a double not
on toendre but it's a double meaning it's on the
planes and they're speaking in plain language. Brilliant, A plus
ten out of ten. He shows up, he leaves the
Plane Speaker and becomes her managing editor, and if you
can't tell by his last name, they soon get married.
(33:39):
And one of the reasons I like their relationship is
most of the time on this show, I cover some
man who did something really important, and then about three
quarters of the way through reading like this or that biography,
it's like, oh yeah, and he was like married, and
she did all the same stuff he did and did
literally as much work as he did, and we just
don't bother. I'm not even gonna put her name in
this book. Why would I give you that? You know,
(34:01):
this is a nice reversal of that, because he did
all of this shit too, and no one remembers him.
He was her co editor. They were like equals. They
ran it as a partnership. Everything I've read implies that
like she was kind of like, you know, like maybe
a little bit more of the like pants of the
family around it, right like m hmmhich is a weird,
(34:22):
horrible gendered phrase that I grew up with. But you know,
everything leaves him out in order to do the great
women of history theory.
Speaker 3 (34:31):
Hey, she bought the paper, she got that sketchy loan,
and she got the paper.
Speaker 2 (34:35):
I know she got it done. He showed up and
helped her do it. And you know he worked there
for twenty one years until he died in nineteen thirty four.
They were a power couple doing the hard work for
which she gets all the credit. And the thing I
like about it, I don't think he would have mind
it at all. No, Like I think I'm going to
have him as one of the great wife guys of
history who had no problem being overshadowed by his wife.
(35:00):
Under new ownership, the paper really found its voice. It
probably became the California Eagle. At this point it was
probably the Eagle already by that point. Ah, but if
it had been the California Owl, how history would have changed.
It never would have gone away. People would have been like,
that's such a sick title. It became a twenty page
weekly paper instead of a four page tabloid. And I
(35:23):
think for a long time she's writing the whole damn thing.
What I think. I know she's doing a lot of
the writing. I've seen it as the majority of the writing.
I don't know to what degree they're hiring people. Actually,
I do know by the nineteen twenties they had editors
and stuff working with them, so it's possible that by
the time they built up to this level they have employees.
(35:47):
And they take the paper very political. I think the
paper had always been political by simply existing, but she
became to focus it more on activist fight after activist fight,
one of the main things that they get credit for.
I thought, ask if you've ever seen but I haven't
actually seen it. You know, the film Birth of a
Nation from nineteen fifteen.
Speaker 3 (36:06):
I do, and I have not seen it either.
Speaker 2 (36:08):
I feel like I should hate watch it. At some point.
I just can't bring myself to do that to myself
with an evening.
Speaker 3 (36:13):
You know, it seems really boring too. I don't know.
Speaker 2 (36:16):
Yeah, yeah, it's true, like anything from nineteen fifteen is
going to be boring to watch now, but extra boring
if you're like, I just hate all these people. There
was a racist film called Birth of a Nation. It
came out nineteen fifteen. It is like literally one of
the masterpieces of just racist cinema that like went on
to inspire the Nazis and just is terrible. I have
nothing nice to say about it. It also is the
(36:37):
reason that KKK came back. And when it came out
in nineteen fifteen, the California Eagle was probably the first
paper to be, like, whoa the fuck y'all say this
terrible thing. It probably didn't phrase it that way. I
don't know how much they cust or didn't cuss. Most
people don't cuss when they write newspapers. This is why
I can't run a newspaper. And so black newspapers all
(36:58):
over the country started a campaign to get this movie
shut down and get it canceled out of various movie theaters,
and they did not entirely successfully, but a lot of
movie theaters canceled their showings and they limited the spread
of this propaganda, sometimes by people throwing bricks through windows
and responding to a movie you don't like by smashing
(37:19):
out the windows of the theater may seem extreme, but
this movie is, as I said, one of the greatest
pieces of white supremacist culture ever created. It's a celebration
of the original ku Klux Klan is directly responsible for
the rebirth of that organization, the second era of the KKK,
which is much larger than the original one and was
basically like a cultural institution and kind of a multi
(37:40):
level marketing scheme, which I learned about from Behind the Bastards.
Never heard of it, Sophy, I think you'd like it.
There's another podcast called Behind the Bastards. It's on the
same network, and they covered the KKK. It's like the
reverse of this show. It's like an uncool people did
uncool stuff, which is a ridiculous concept for a podcast,
but there you go, totally. And the Klan wasn't happy
(38:03):
about what she did. They hated this woman. They spent
years after her. In nineteen twenty five, she got a
hold of an internal memo of the California KKK that
had a plot to frame three black leaders for drinking
and driving. Like it was like, we're gonna sneak in
and put it at a half empty bottle of gin
(38:25):
in their car and then get them to crash, and
then everyone's gonna think black people are irresponsible and everyone's
gonna become racists and talk like this what dorks? Yeah,
and someone like the unspoken part of this, someone leaked
that shit to her.
Speaker 3 (38:42):
I think, like someone from the KKK.
Speaker 2 (38:45):
I don't know how she got the letter, right, I,
you know, unless she's going through their mail. I think
someone was like.
Speaker 3 (38:52):
Maybe one of them was like this is such a
stupid plan.
Speaker 2 (38:56):
Yeah, totally, it's just yeah, leak it. Yeah. So she
gets a hold of this internal memo from nineteen twenty
five and she publishes it in the newspaper, and it's
like this is what the KKK is trying to do.
And what's important to understand is that the KKK in
this point time, they're like legitimate, you like, you know,
(39:16):
it's like perfectly legal. It's not like it's not the
like later nineteen forties nineteen fifties where you're like hiding
your clan robes in the closet. This is like upstanding
business people. Right, this is like good old family whiteness
or whatever, as long as we all hate black people
and also other minorities, including Catholics for some odd reason.
Like and she's like, look at these pieces of shit
(39:39):
and publishes this. So the KKK sue her, the California
branch sue her from libel, and it was a criminal complaint.
She was facing a year in prison. She wrote, quote,
if to jail, we must go for publishing without malice
such propaganda as we, in common with all fair minded citizens,
(40:01):
believe prejudicial to good government. We go with a smile.
We go forward, unafraid, as we continue our steady march
for law and order, fighting every inch of the way
all things which retard our progress. So like, also she
could write I'm saying yeah, and she lost the case
(40:22):
in front of an all white court. I'm sorry, oh sorry,
the Klan. This is an important distinction. The clan is
a terrible reversal. They lost their case in front of
an all white court. Punkass because their argument was like,
we didn't write that, and they're like, yeah, you fucking
wrote that, and that's also that's not libel. Yeah, And
(40:43):
so the KKK they kept sending her threatening letters with
lots of nwords in them for some weird reason. They
didn't know they're not supposed to say that it's white people.
They like threatened her for years, and at one point
they like showed up and she like looks out, like
it's like a storefront kind of thing's got like full
play glass windows to the office. She like looks out
and there's like eight fucking clansmen outside, and so she's
just like, God, I got a gun around here somewhere,
(41:06):
like finds a gun. She does not shoot it. She
just pulls out a gun and like walks towards the window,
and they're like, oh, we're good, and they all leave.
Speaker 3 (41:14):
She's probably on deadline. She has an entire paper to
write herself.
Speaker 2 (41:18):
He's like like, please, and I have slept in two days.
I'm a fucking with you and I love okay. There's
a following back and forth that is quoted by La
mag And this is from a husband. This is a
marital conversation quote missus Bass, one of these days you're
going to get me killed. Her husband and co editor
(41:41):
Joseph Bass, would often say, mister Bass, it will be
in a good cause. She'd reply, he.
Speaker 3 (41:51):
Is an epic wife guy.
Speaker 2 (41:52):
You know, he's just like, ah, here we go again.
I married a badass.
Speaker 3 (41:58):
Oh, I love her, but she was going to get
me killed. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (42:03):
The paper also argued against segregation of the US military,
which famously they had to do twice during both World
Wars because, shamefully, even as the United States military was
invading Germany for being racist, they did so as racistly
as they could. By nineteen twenty five, they had a
circulation of sixty thousand, making it the most read black
(42:26):
paper in California. Here's a thing where I've read a
whole lot of different things in various directions. Later, the
circulation numbers near the end in the nineteen fifties are
going to be much lower than that. I've also read
that the Topeka Plain Dealer, the one that her husband left,
was the most read black newspaper west of the Mississippi,
but I am skeptical of it out selling the Eagle,
so that might have been before he left. I don't know.
(42:49):
She had a weekly column called on the Sidewalk, which
she used to talk about the need for civil rights,
not just for black Americans. She constantly spoke up for
like every ethnic minority in the United States. She talked
a lot about the Latino community. There was some stuff
that I eventually want to get into more when I
(43:09):
learn more about it, where there was like a big
roundup of like Mexican American teenage boys after a murderer,
and they were like all being blamed or whatever, like
hundreds of them or whatever the fuck, you know, So
she writes about that. She in World War Two, she
is one of the few people speaking out for an
end of the Japanese internment camps. And in nineteen thirty
(43:31):
The Eagle published their own editorial platform for everyone to see,
and I'm just going to read it. Good platform. Their
interests are quote the hiring of Negroes as a matter
of right rather than as a concession in those institutions
where their patronage creates a demand for labor. The increased
participation of Negroes and municipal, state, and national government. The
(43:53):
abolition of enforced segregation and all other artificial barriers to
the recognition of merit, the patronized of Negroes by Negroes
as a matter of principle, more rapid development of those
communities in which Negroes live by cooperation between citizens and
those who have business investments in such communities, and an
enthusiastic support for a greater degree of service at the
(44:16):
hands of all social, civic, charitable and religious organizations. And
so they're like, this is what we believe. If there's
a black business, if there's a business that relies on
black customers, it should hire black people, and that black people,
like we should be buying from stores that don't refuse
to sell whatever basic shit. And because of this radical stance,
(44:39):
she is going to spend thirty years being investigated by
the FBI.
Speaker 3 (44:45):
For this platform.
Speaker 2 (44:47):
The newspaper in its stances m h are what she's
going to be investigated for. But what's going to I'll
probably end up saying this again later in the script.
But one of the things that's neat funny bad Bad's
the word is that some of the FBI agents who
are like following her keep writing and being like, hey, boss,
she's not a communist. She says what she believes every
(45:10):
single week. We can read what she believes. This is
what she believes, And Jagger Hoover's like, not keep following her.
It's gonna slip. She's a communist. So it's like, this
is what she's after, right, She's very clear about it.
She doesn't have any problem with communists. That's also going
to come up because also in a real credit where
(45:30):
credit is due weigh whenever I'm talking about civil rights
in America before the civil rights movement, whenever we're talking
about like the nineteen twenties and thirties in particular, the
Communist Party is left out of the history because of
the red Scare right. The Communist Party was perhaps the
single most influential racially mixed organization fighting for black rights
(45:50):
in the nineteen twenties and nineteen thirties in the United States.
So a great deal of the people of all races
who are fighting for the same things as she was,
were committed card carrying communists. She just wasn't. And like
most of the media people we've covered on the show,
she was not afraid of new media. She started podcasting,
but on the radio, so backwards podcasting whatever they call that,
(46:14):
I don't know, whatever you call radio podcasting. She did
it six nights a week starting in nineteen thirty eight.
They ran a fifteen minute news show that they called
a newspaper of the air. Isn't it great?
Speaker 3 (46:28):
It's kind of whimsical.
Speaker 2 (46:29):
I love it, I know. And then by nineteen forty
they had the California Eagle Hour on Sundays on a
different radio station. It still Republican, even more Republicans. The
California Eagle Hour. You know, that's the where you want
to go to for news. What about the Owl Hour?
Speaker 3 (46:46):
I'll take the Owl Hour?
Speaker 2 (46:47):
What if it was our Owl Hour, like the one
that belongs to us, our Owl Hour?
Speaker 3 (46:54):
Welcome to our Owl Hour.
Speaker 2 (46:56):
Yeah, that's how they can figure out who's good and
at the radio podcasting. In order to do it is
that they can say all our.
Speaker 3 (47:06):
It's gonna be my next podcast.
Speaker 2 (47:09):
Hell yeah. But then she faced terrible repression, but she's
going to survive and fight back against and we're going
to talk about it on Wednesday. But first, one, if
you have any thoughts about this, I want to hear
them in Two, how can people hear more of what
you do?
Speaker 3 (47:28):
Well? One, thank you for introducing me to this incredible
woman and her incredible unnamed husband.
Speaker 2 (47:36):
I know I just say is yeah, but yeah, yeah,
oh you did. I've already forgotten blackburns in the middle anymore.
I don't even remember the first name. But okay, when
Blackburn's in your name, that's what I'm remembering. I can
only remember one name per person.
Speaker 3 (47:49):
Incredible story. I can't wait to find out what happens next.
If people want to listen to my podcast, just look
for unladylike and can conspiracy. She wrote, Yeah, I just
talk a lot about like women and gender and trying
to make sense of this this kooky old world. The
(48:11):
front of the pod.
Speaker 1 (48:11):
Bridget Todd has a new audiobook out and it is
called Love at First prompt AI in the Future of Intimacy.
Speaker 2 (48:20):
And don't worry. It's not going to convince you to
run out and get an AI girlfriend.
Speaker 1 (48:25):
No, No, this is trusted source friends.
Speaker 3 (48:28):
If there's anyone I trust yeah to tell me about
AI girlfriends, I do need to listen to this. It
is Bridget for sure.
Speaker 2 (48:34):
I kind of feel like it's like she's like the
only person I would trust with this story.
Speaker 3 (48:38):
One.
Speaker 2 (48:40):
Yeah, even the people I know and trust on the
like anti AI AI front, I like don't know if
I trust their like empathy around understanding complicated things, you know,
mm hmm. Anyway, Well, next, when this Wednesday, this very Wednesday,
talking about the rids and in the meantime, don't throw
(49:02):
each other under the bus, learn from history, stand up
against red scares, and take care of each other.
Speaker 3 (49:16):
Cool People Who.
Speaker 1 (49:17):
Did Cool Stuff is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more podcasts and cool Zone Media, visit our website
Goolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the five
or radio app, hop a Podcasts, or wherever you get
your podcasts.
Cool Zon Media.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Hello, and welcome to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff,
your weekly reminder that when the federal government does terrible
things to people, people can fight back and actually successfully
have long and successful lives of doing incredible activism. I'm
your host, Margaret Kiljoy, and this week on the show,
my guest is Kristen Conger. Hi. How are you? Hi?
Speaker 3 (00:25):
I'm great, so happy to be here.
Speaker 2 (00:27):
You are the host of the podcasts Unladylike and Conspiracy.
She wrote, You are the former host and forever founder
of the podcast stuff Mom Never Told You, which is
how I first heard of you, because it is the
home of one of my all time favorite returning guests,
Samantha McVeigh, So I figured you're probably really cool too, Love.
Speaker 1 (00:45):
Samantha and our dear dear dear dear dear dear dear
dear friend, Bridge Todd.
Speaker 2 (00:50):
That's true, okay, but you are the second Conger we've had. Actually,
I actually don't even know if I've had Molly Conger
on the show, but I just like spiritually have had
Molly Kong on the show. You have okay, great. I
don't remember things. That's kind of my bit to study
a new subject every week. It works out fine for
me anyway. You're the second Conger we got on the show.
(01:12):
What is a conger? Like a Cooper has made barrels?
What does a conger have done?
Speaker 3 (01:17):
As far as I know, conger was a shortened version
from bell conger.
Speaker 2 (01:22):
Oh like you hit bells.
Speaker 3 (01:24):
So I don't know if that meant we made the
bells or just rang the bell. Whoa, that's something to
do with bells. And I'm thinking about, you know, just
reclaiming the bell bell Conger. Maybe I can get Molly
Conger on board. I don't know.
Speaker 2 (01:38):
I love that I have an entire set of tuned
bells in my kitchen where normal people keep their instruments
their dining room.
Speaker 3 (01:47):
I should know how to play them. You know, it's
in my blood.
Speaker 2 (01:51):
Hell yeah. Also on the show is Sophie. Hi, Sophie,
you're a producer.
Speaker 3 (01:56):
Hey, magbye, I'm happy to be here.
Speaker 2 (02:01):
This week. We are on a red Scare kick. I've
been on a red Scare kick for a moment because
it is a thing that includes way too much of
my brain space in my waking life. Because there's a
new red Scare starter, and I thought to myself, why
not take time to look at an anti red scare
activist a principle. I'm going to see if you can
figureut who it is. I have no idea whether you'll
(02:22):
know this person or not, just literally no idea. A
principled woman who seemed constitutionally incapable of backing down from
a fight. She was a pioneering journalist, probably the first
black woman to own a newspaper in the United States,
and certainly the first black woman vice presidential candidate in
US history when she ran for office in nineteen fifty
(02:42):
two on the Progressive Party ticket. It's not a quiz.
I mean, I'm asking if you know, but that's just
literally out of curiosity. I wouldn't have known.
Speaker 3 (02:52):
I wish I knew. She sounds incredible.
Speaker 2 (02:55):
Well, I have good news for you about the next
two hours of your life, because we're going to talk
the one the only Charlotta spears bass and I am
accidentally going to say bass probably several times, and that's
embarrassing because bass looks like bass.
Speaker 1 (03:13):
I really like the name Charlotta.
Speaker 3 (03:15):
I know, yeah, it's a powerful name.
Speaker 2 (03:18):
Charlotta spears bass like coming out the gate, strong name.
She is cool as hell and like can't be as
easily summed up as every like pop history piece that
I read about her. Some of them are really well done,
but she has like a lot of articles written about
her a couple of years ago because of Kamala Harris,
(03:40):
who she has almost nothing in common with besides identity
and being vice presidential candidates or whatever, you know.
Speaker 3 (03:46):
But yeah, my question though, is like, how did I
miss her? It seems like she deserves way more attention.
Speaker 2 (03:52):
I know, I was really surprised because like everything I've
read is like, oh, yeah, everyone knows about this person,
and I'm like, I had never I even know a
lot of the supporting characters in this story, like Marcus
Garvey's and here, Paul Robison's in here. Yeah, and like
also just like specifically, black journalism is a thing that's
(04:13):
really interesting to me, and like the role of newspapers
and social change, because frankly, old timing newspapers were almost
more like modern podcasts than they are like modern newspapers,
because like the line between opinion piece and news was
a lot blurrier, right, Like it is also in our
field of.
Speaker 3 (04:30):
Work, you don't say I try to.
Speaker 2 (04:34):
Tell the truth all the time. It's just my truth
has opinion in it. I straight up don't know how
well known this person is, right, but as is classic
for talking about a black person born in the US South,
maybe maybe the US South Papolios North. She was born
(04:55):
in the nineteenth century, and so I've therefore read contradictory
dates about when she was born and where she was born.
This whole story is going to have more contradictory facts
from seemingly trustworthy sources than I wish it did. There's
like multiple people with like PhDs or pedigrees being like, oh,
blah blah blah this thing, and other people being like
(05:16):
this other thing, and that's just going to be the
way it is.
Speaker 3 (05:20):
Interesting.
Speaker 2 (05:22):
Charlotta Amanda Spears was born on Valentine's Day sometime between
eighteen seventy four and eighteen seventy eight, or why not
maybe eighteen seventy nine or eighteen eighty eighteen seventy four
seems like the most likely. So going to go with it.
I'll probably point out when there's like contradictory stuff, but
overall I'm doing it like this is my best interpretation. Right.
(05:45):
She was the sixth of eleven kids, which is both
a lot of kids and also a oddly or a
normal number for the time. Her mother was Kate Spears.
Her father was Hiram Spears, and he was a brain Claire.
And she was probably born in the bustling city of Sumter,
(06:06):
South Carolina, which is so bustling and I had never
heard of it and I had to look it up.
Speaker 3 (06:10):
I'm like, what, it sounds very Confederacy.
Speaker 2 (06:15):
Oh yeah, no, absolutely, I mean the Confederacy is you know,
dead and gone sort of by this point. But yeah,
Sumter is currently the eighth biggest city in South Carolina,
so it has that going for it. Hell yeah, it's
not a big place. It's also possible she was born
in Little Compton, Rhode Island. I like, how oddly specific
these two places are and very far away from me.
Speaker 3 (06:39):
Yeah, very different settings.
Speaker 2 (06:43):
Yeah, and she's going to move to Rhode Island, but
not to Little Compton. So most sources say South Carolina,
and that's certainly demographically more likely. We're going to talk
about the Great Migration and stuff like that, but that
comes fifty years later, and honestly, she's going to be
part of what causes the Great Migration. By well, I'll
(07:03):
get into it. I just love how like individual figures,
like I hate the great man of history theory, but
instead I love a kind of inverse of that, where
instead of it being an undifferentiated mob and like social
conditions that create change, I love how it's like the
accumulated action of a whole lot of individuals and.
Speaker 3 (07:24):
Groups almost like to be super reductive. It's almost butterfly effectish.
Speaker 2 (07:29):
Yeah, totally, which is why I have my giant red
string board of all of the weird connections between all
of these people, and it keeps me up at night
that I don't know all of these connections, and if
I had a time machine, I would be absurd and
just do it as a weird historian, not try and
make the world better like anything like that, and just
be like, but how'd you know that? Guy?
Speaker 3 (07:50):
Those are the kind of conspiracy theories I think we
need more of the.
Speaker 2 (07:54):
Like small people who accidentally created big change. Yeah, I'm
into that. Most sources issues born in South Carolina. That's
the most likely from my point of view, But the
Rhode Island claim comes from the library that holds all
of her papers, so I'll fucking whatever. What I do
know is that eighteen seventy four to eighteen eighty was
(08:16):
a rough time to be born a black person in
the US South or the US North. The Union had
won the Civil War in eighteen sixty five. I always
have to include as much context as possible, because I
always never know things when I go into things. The
Union had won the Civil War in eighteen sixty five,
which brought legal chattel slavery to a halt in the
US and for about ten years during reconstruction, there was
(08:40):
a flourishing of black economic and political power in the
US South because that's where the overwhelming majority of black
people lived. Black politician after black politician was elected, and
now that it wasn't literally a crime to be literate,
literacy rates among black people were skyrocketing. Like I am
not aware of another moment in time where a group
(09:03):
of people had their literacy rates go up so fast.
Because it's worth underlining here socialisms. We gonna be talking
about a black journalist what a threat black literacy was
to white supremacy. When Nat Turner led a rebellion in
eighteen thirty one that just had the slavers pissing themselves
in fear. Just you can't overestimate how much Nat Turner's
(09:26):
rebellion scared people. Part of what scared people was that
he was literate, he had read the Bible that he preached,
and black sailors from the North were smuggling abolitionist texts
into the South. And in response to Nat Turner's rebellion,
teaching literacy to enslaved people became illegal. So it was like,
now you're like, even the white person can get in
(09:47):
trouble for teaching black people how to read. Before the war,
only about ten percent of enslaved people were literate. By
eighteen seventy, the number was twenty percent. By nineteen ten
it was seventy percent. And so for twelve years you
have this kind of beautiful thing going on, and then
in eighteen seventy seven, federal troops are withdrawn and white
(10:09):
Southern racists reassert their power through Jim Crow laws. And
that's the time period in which Charlotta was born during
a beautiful dream that was shattered by powerful bigots. So
in eighteen ninety four, when she's sixteen or twenty or
(10:30):
fourteen or something, she's young. Yeah, she moved to Rhode Island,
unless she was born there in which case. At this point,
she moved to Providence, Rhode Island.
Speaker 3 (10:42):
Hilarious, and she.
Speaker 2 (10:44):
Went there because her older brother was there. And supposedly,
I'm going to do so many supposedly as in this
and I tried to look all of them up because
I'm weird and obsessive. Supposedly she attended Pembroke College and Providence,
which is part of Brown University, the Ivy League, which
was the women's college that was attached to Brown University.
If this is true, she would have been one of
(11:06):
the very first black women, and it would throw off
a lot of the timelines of what I read. It's
still possible. I still think she did it. I just
think it throws off people's timelines because Pembrook started teaching.
It was just kind of a throwaway fact, like, oh,
and then she went to this Ivy League university as
like a black girl from the South, and I'm like,
I fucking need to know more about that. This is
the eighteen nineties we're talking about, right. Pembrooke started teaching
(11:30):
women in eighteen ninety two. The first black woman admitted
to the college wasn't until until nineteen oh one. Ethel
Tremaine Robinson and she didn't graduate until nineteen oh five,
so Bass could have attended, but not right away, and
that's what I assume happened. I think she did about
a semester there, and this would have been rough. The
(11:51):
teachers and students were racist as hell. I read some
about Ethel Tremaine's experiences there. The teachers and students were
racist as hell. She wouldn't have been allowed to live
on campus with the white women. So she's allowed to
come to class, but she's not allowed to socialize or live,
you know. And there would have been no scholarships available
to her, which is obviously the kind of like systemic
(12:12):
oppression that she's going to spend her entire life fighting against.
I would suspect that her brother paid her way through school.
Ellis Spears was a businessman who had two restaurants and
an ice delivery service to his name, just not nothing.
Speaker 3 (12:31):
I'd love to see those menus.
Speaker 2 (12:33):
Yeah, totally.
Speaker 3 (12:36):
That it was good.
Speaker 2 (12:37):
Well, then we really find out whether he's from South
Carolina or.
Speaker 3 (12:40):
Or an island exactly.
Speaker 2 (12:44):
And so she started her newspaper life while she's in
Providence working for the Providence Watchman, which is a black
newspaper at the time there, and she's selling ads and subscriptions,
which I would like to note is truly a noble pastime,
selling the ads that support media that promote radical ideas,
(13:06):
which is why to carry on in her legacy, I
would like, for once we don't usually do this, to
have products and services that support the show. Interrupted the
podcast and reback. I had no idea how far into this.
I was like almost tried to rework my script so
(13:26):
that that would be at the right time for an
AD break.
Speaker 1 (13:28):
There's no right time for an AD break.
Speaker 2 (13:32):
There's no wrong time for an AD break. So that
was smooth, Thank you, thank you. Although I do think
it's actually kind of it probably brought this up before,
even like the like radical newspapers of the sixties and
seventies were selling ads, and like it's kind of a
thing that people like we kind of whitewashed the radicals
of the past and sort of like anything that doesn't
(13:54):
map to like what we would expect or want them
to do, we tend to try and take out when
we talk about them. So it took me a while.
I was surprised when I was like the young Lord's
like the Puerto Rican radical movement in New York City.
They sold ads in their newspaper. I'm like, oh, yeah, no,
because they wanted to print their newspaper, like they didn't
(14:18):
have big money behind them. The Watchman was a black newspaper,
And if you've heard almost any episode of the show
at about the turn of the century, you know that
newspapers were kind of a big deal at the time.
The podcasts of their time, as I like to call them,
although I also sometimes call other things the podcast at
the time, like street what's the thing where he said
(14:39):
on a soapbox street soapboxers, I'm just gonna call them
the street preaching or yeah no, But there's this kind
of thing where like there's a big thing in the
early twentieth century before Twitter, everyone would be bored, so
they just go out to the park and they'd be
basically like people soapboxing. But soapboxing was kind of a
(15:00):
comedy act because you had to do infotainment. You had
to get across your ideas right, but you had to
do it entertainingly because you have literally other soapboxers all
around the park and you're competing for an audience. So
it's like competitive infotainment comedy.
Speaker 3 (15:15):
Oh god, so it was like proto YouTube.
Speaker 2 (15:18):
Yeah, it wasn't podcasts, it was proto YouTube. That's what
soapboxing was. Your background's like journalist stuff, right, m And like,
I'm curious. I'm just really interested in how journalism shapes
ideas and the way that we like view journalism has
changed so much. The idea of the objective newspaper was
(15:39):
kind of I have always heard basically invented by the
New York Times in order to tell newspapers being like,
ah are the ones who are telling you the truth
and nothing but the truth? You know. I'm just interested
in all that stuff.
Speaker 3 (15:51):
I mean, I won't take you down a full journalism
school tangent, but a full journalism school tangent down that
old dusty road. I actually majored in newspapers, which is
sounds like I majored in like horse and buggies. Yeah yeah,
(16:11):
And it was taught as like a very like you know,
a noble art of objectivity. But maybe it was just
getting sold spon con from the New York Times and
didn't even know it.
Speaker 2 (16:23):
I mean, it's funny, it's like I'll kind of make
fun of that. But like when I was like a journalist,
but I'm going to use air quotes because I was
mostly an activist when I was younger, and I did
a lot of like video reporting on protests and things
like that turn of the millennia. Because I'm ancient. We
always talked about how objectivity is a myth, but we
kind of did that to like defend our own like
(16:45):
utter lack of objectivity. And I eventually was like, objectivity
is kind of a myth, but we should still kind
of strive for a lot of things that are mythical,
you know, Like I want to tell you the truth
when I tell you this story about someone that I
think is cool, and I also want to be really
upfront about my biases so that you can analyze what
(17:05):
I'm saying and say, like, all right, well Margaret thinks
that because she thinks the following things, right. But I'm
still going to try, you know.
Speaker 3 (17:13):
Yeah, I think I've philosophically like shifted away from, like
you said, like accepting the myth of objectivity, maybe still
striving for it, but really like I strive to give
the context at the very least. Yeah, Yeah, totally, people
can hang on to.
Speaker 2 (17:30):
Yeah, that's like, the only way I can care about
history is once I understand the things around it, like
a series of like individual incidents, names and dates and stuff.
Speaker 3 (17:39):
Oh yeah, timeline.
Speaker 2 (17:40):
No, yeah, no, that's never gonna I only start caring
about timeline once I've studied so many things in a
general area that I can start being like, oh shit,
that happened in nineteen sixty four. Then that means the
following thing, you know, mm hmm. But like that's not
where I'm starting, and that's not where I expect the
audience to start. That's why I like my podcasts is
that they admit that also, our goal is to keep
(18:02):
people entertained, which is why I'm sure this meta conversation
is totally entertaining to you, the listener. And so though
these black newspapers all over the country, and it's a
really important part of the network of emancipation that people
are building of liberation, like literally one of them is
called the Liberator, although that one is funny, I think,
(18:23):
oh lord, that one actually was in the eighteen sixties
and it was actually run by a white man, but
it was considered a black newspaper because all of its
readership was black. And most of the people doing the
other stuff were black, but it was being financed by
a like rich white abolitionist. One day, I'm going to
do more about The Liberator. I only read a paragraph
about it while doing this episode, and then I didn't
put it in the script. Anyway, she worked not for
(18:44):
the Liberator. She worked for the Watchman, which is a
good name for a paper. They had cool names for
papers back then. Soon we're going to talk about a
paper called the Owl, and I'm really into it. So
she worked for ten years for this place, and I
can't find too much information about that specific paper, which
makes me sad. But Charlotta Bass wasn't thriving in Providence.
(19:06):
It was cold and it was humid, and she had
asthma and arthritis, which is going to make her career
as a writer extra impressive, I must say, because not
a time of keyboards that are easy on the joints.
So she said, what if I go where it's warm
and dry? What if I moved to a city you
all might have ever heard of, Los Angeles, California, So
(19:28):
ify that one's for you, because I know you like
Los Angeles, California.
Speaker 1 (19:32):
Yeah, born and raised baby, This is a whole story
about your city. It's literally the shortest section in the
script Los Angeles, the California section.
Speaker 2 (19:45):
Oh, but I'm going to be talking about a whole
neighborhood that used to exist. I'm going to talk about
the red lining. I'm going to talk about the Highway ten,
which is a highway that I totally know. It is freeway.
It's the tenth one. It's the tenth Freeway.
Speaker 1 (19:58):
We don't have highways. They're free with.
Speaker 2 (20:00):
Okay, are you Caddy Corner or Kitty Corner?
Speaker 1 (20:04):
I'm Kitty Corner.
Speaker 2 (20:05):
What about you, Kristen? What's where you're at?
Speaker 3 (20:08):
I'm Caddy Corner. I'm so sorry, I've got to leave
this zoom.
Speaker 2 (20:13):
I think I'm Caddy Corner. No, I'm Kitty Corner. I
grew up on those maps. I grew up on the
one where we don't have a name for this. It's
what I grew up with.
Speaker 3 (20:23):
It's okay.
Speaker 1 (20:24):
I get outed as being from California and Oregon all
the time because in California we call freeways like it
would be like the five, Yeah, the four or five,
and they don't do that here, and they're like, it's
the I five and you get judged for being interesting.
Speaker 2 (20:43):
I wrote a story where the characters go down I
five and I said, like, they went down the five,
or maybe I said went down the I five. And
my Oregon editor was like, we don't call that here,
and I'm like, I lived there for six years. I've
hitchhiked on that road. It's the only state where you're
allowed to. I feel as though I can call it this.
(21:07):
This is totally what people are listening to this far.
So Charlotta Bass moves to Los Angeles, California. This is
the very beginning of what's called the Great Migration, when
black people fled the South in incredible numbers. She's not
fleeing the South, she's leaving New England. But there's a
sort of internal diaspora to escape Jim Crow and to
(21:29):
seek out a better life either up north or out west.
And one of the reasons that it was good for
people out west one of the reasons among many, but
one of my little things that butterflied out was a
black newspaper from Los Angeles called The Owl. Yes later
(21:50):
it's going to be called the California Eagle. It has
gone by a bunch of names, and I have seen
it both called the owl, the California Owl, the eagle,
and the California Eagle.
Speaker 3 (22:00):
Love that.
Speaker 2 (22:01):
Yeah, I believe it was called the owl and then
became the eagle, and then became the California Eagle, and
it was never the California Owl. But I don't know,
and I've read all four. But it's a sick name,
the owl. I get really sad when people have the
sick name and they change it to the normal name.
The Eagle's fine, not mad at the eagle rolls off
the tongue a little easier.
Speaker 3 (22:20):
It's a little Republican coded.
Speaker 1 (22:21):
I'm yeah, you're patriotic, exactly exactly.
Speaker 2 (22:24):
CHRISTI yeah, totally.
Speaker 3 (22:27):
Oh.
Speaker 2 (22:27):
I wonder how much that has changed, whether like yeah,
who knows. Anyway, For the last fifty years of the
existence of this paper, which was around for twenty one
and a half confederacies, which is how I measure lengths
of time, for the last fifty years of this paper,
it was the California Eagle. So I'm gonna mostly call
it that, even though it's the least fun of the
three names. The Owl slash California Eagle was established in
(22:49):
eighteen seventy nine, and it lasted until nineteen sixty four,
eighty five years twenty one times the Confederacy. It was
started by a bl black man who'd moved from Texas
to Los Angeles, actually honestly a black kid who moved
from Texas to Los Angeles, John James Neimour, and it
became an important black voice in California. I don't know
(23:12):
as much about him as I would like, but he
was born in Texas to black farmers. That's what everything says.
If he was born in the early eighteen sixties. He
was not born to black farmers. He was born to
black enslaved farm workers. And people love leaving things like
that out of stories. And then somehow or another, he
got himself to California to start a groundbreaking newspaper when
(23:36):
he was sixteen or seventeen years old. Wow, I don't
know what the fuck you were doing when he was
sixteen not that. Yeah, totally wasting time. Yeah, this man
started his life project when he was sixteen or seventeen
years old. And I love these moments of outsized results
for small actions. I can't prove the cause and effect
(23:59):
specifically about the Great Migration in this but John James
Nimore started the OWL specifically to help people leaving the
South to find a new home in California. And since
the Great Migration was one of the most important demographic
shifts in US history, it's had this enormous impact on
US culture, and so on some level, the OWL helped
(24:22):
make that happen. Even though it started thirty years before
the Great Migration, it started making it easier for people
to come out to California. California ended up being I
read a bunch of different quotes and I didn't end
up putting any of them in my script, And I
don't know why. I read a bunch of different quotes
from different thinkers talking about like, look, California is the
nicest place to be black in the United States of America.
Is what people were saying at various points in like
(24:44):
the nineteen tens, nineteen twenties.
Speaker 3 (24:46):
Like any specific reason, like why California Now.
Speaker 2 (24:51):
I think that's why it ended up in the script,
as I was like, that was like one of those
things where I was like, I need to learn more
about that, and I didn't. But I assume Jim Crow
had the least reach. I assume kind of a like
a little bit of like the wild West vibe, but
like with cities, you know, I assume it's the kind
of the combination of those two factors, because the when
(25:13):
sometimes when you're on like the frontier, even though that's
like a land of a lot of racist shit, there's
also like more permissiveness for like breaking social boundaries, right, yes, yeah,
And I've read a lot of like, oh crap, it's
been years since I did this. There was a black
trans woman who ran a brothel and did a whole
bunch of crazy shit out in California and was like
(25:34):
doing all kinds of awesome stuff and I cannot remember
her name or what she did.
Speaker 3 (25:40):
Ah crap, she sounds cool, magpie.
Speaker 1 (25:43):
To be fair, you don't remember most people's names, and
that's fine.
Speaker 2 (25:48):
That's true. I actually, if I spend enough time alone,
every living object that is not me is named Rintraw
after my dog. Yeah, by accident. So I'll like shoe
a spider out of my house and be like, get
out if you're intra and then I'm like, my friends
will come of anyway. I'm totally normal. But yeah, so
California was a place I am suspecting that would be
(26:09):
my guess this combination of like urban living is usually
much better for minorities, but also sometimes frontier societies are
also a place with more permissiveness of social mobility, which
plays really complicatedly into colonialism, right, because a lot of
the colonists, like for example, the Japanese colonists who came
over to Korea and were a horrible colonizing force in
(26:31):
Korea for many years, were the people who couldn't make
it in Japan, and so they were doing something like
edgy and cool by going and becoming colonial assholes in Korea.
And it's like the similar thing that Britain did and
the US did. It's just like a pattern, and so
the frontier is always like a complicated place. That's my
best guess. In eighteen eighty five, LA was only about
(26:53):
one percent black. The two largest minority groups were Chinese
and Japanese, and when people got there they could count
on the OWL to help them find out about housing
and jobs, and I believe it ran also articles specifically
about how to help people find their way in a
new city. I've also seen it described as a paper
that's specifically focused on telling positive stories about black people,
(27:17):
which rules because alongside honest descriptions of the problems of
the world. I think it's well, it's literally my podcast.
It's very important to hold up positive stories as well,
and it was a very short paper. It was a
four page tabloid. I am guessing it came out weekly,
but I could not tell you. Nimour was also involved
in the early years of the first Black Baptist church
(27:38):
anywhere in southern California, Second Baptist, which was found in
eighteen eighty five. I believe it's still around today, as
we've covered a lot in the show, but it's always
worth repeating for context. Black churches were crucial parts of
early Black liberation movements, and so helping getting this thing
going was another rather important accomplishment on his part. This
(27:58):
particular church, Second Baptist W. E. B. Du Bois, spoke there.
He's one of the people who had a quote about
California that I didn't write into the script. The minister's
son was the director of the La ANDAACP MLKA Junior
preached there in nineteen sixty eight, just three weeks before
he was murdered. But unfortunately for the world, Neimour's health
(28:18):
wasn't the best and he died young in nineteen twelve,
at fifty years old. People at the time seemed to
describe it as he worked himself to death. Here is
one of the problems with being a self starting journalist.
Speaker 3 (28:32):
When you start your life's work at sixteen.
Speaker 2 (28:35):
Well, it was like I always thought I was really
lazy as a kid, and it just turns out I
don't like working for other people, but as soon as
I'm in charge of my own thing, I will work
instead of anything that I should be doing for my health.
So Charlotta Bass had been working there for a year
or two at that point. She started by basically when
(28:56):
she first moved to California. I actually think she wasn't
trying to stay there. I think she was trying to
do that thing that like people used to do in
old timing days, where they're like, it's better for my
health to go to a nicer climate, and I'm going
to go there for a couple of years and recover
and then come back, you know. But she was like,
but I'm not a rich person doing that in Victoria
in England, so I need a job. And so she
started working at this newspaper, I believe, selling ads and
(29:19):
presumably subscriptions, and I think maybe became kind of editor
as Nymour got sick. I think it was mostly a
one man show before that, but I am not sure.
It's my inference. And on his deathbed, Nymore extracted a
promise from her to keep his paper alive. Just such
a dramatic scene to imagine, right, But the catch was
(29:44):
he didn't own his newspaper. She bought the paper at
auction for fifty dollars after his death. Niymour didn't own
the paper. A creepy white dude did no. And the
creepy white dude was like, oh, yeah, sure, you can
keep running the paper. You just have to fuck me.
And she was like, I am not going to fuck you.
(30:05):
So instead she went to a Again this is my
inference here, she went to crime and organized fifty dollars
from crime. From a second hand story, I believe she
went to a pawn shop and said, give me a
sketchy business loan, sketchy loan, shark, I would like to
buy this business and they were like, yeah, okay, here's
fifty bucks, which is about seventeen hundred dollars today, and
(30:28):
bought the paper at auction because the guy who owned
it didn't pulled on to it. He didn't give a
shit about it, right, he sold at auction. She bought it.
She didn't have to fuck him, And at thirty six
years old, she became the first black American woman to
own her own newspaper by like being like smart and fierce.
Speaker 3 (30:47):
And that also says something like the extent to which
she is going to carry through this deathbed promise.
Speaker 2 (30:54):
Yeah, she's amazing. Like at some point I think in
the next episode, I think she's going to drive off
eight members of the KKK with a handgun. Hell yeaes
And she buys this newspaper, and local black leaders I
assume these are all men, show up and are like,
(31:14):
you can't do this, and they think they'd be nice
to her. They're like, look, if a man works himself
to death trying to make this work, you shouldn't even try.
I mean for your own health and well being. That
clearly didn't stop her, But do you know what can
stop this story? For approximately four minutes? Good Lord, thank you? Yeah?
(31:37):
Is it less than that? I actually don't remember how
long the ads are. I really hope not two minutes.
I don't know. It's the ads they can stop the
flow of this podcast by are you talking? Andrew Beck?
So now she's trying to run a newspaper all by herself.
That is actually really hard to do. Do you ever
(31:58):
end up actually working in news after you majored in it? No,
I think this is very common.
Speaker 3 (32:05):
I worked at the college newspaper and then yeah, that
was it. Yeah, and then I got into digital.
Speaker 2 (32:12):
Yeah, you're like one of the earlier on the scene podcasters.
Speaker 3 (32:15):
Right, Yeah, I'm a thousand years old.
Speaker 2 (32:19):
Sorry, I'm not trying to I think you're about my age.
I'm not trying to like put you on a spot anywhere.
Speaker 3 (32:24):
And I don't know why I'm blushing. Yes, I've been
podcasting since two thousand and nine, which is too long.
Speaker 2 (32:33):
I hope I make it that long too. I know
that I need help making podcasts. I ran a podcast
all by myself for a while and it sucked. And
that's why I'm glad Sophie is my producer. Hey, and
she was like, I need a Sophie. She was like,
I need someone to run the business side of this.
(32:54):
Even though she knows how to run the business side,
she just doesn't want to do it all by herself,
so she needs a managing editor, so by nineteen thirteen
she recruited a black newspaper man from Kansas with a
also kind of sick name. I think both of these
people have pretty sick names. Joseph Blackburn Bass. And he
ran the Topeka Plane Speaker, which is another sick name
(33:15):
for a newspaper, the plane Speaker. It's a double not
on toendre but it's a double meaning it's on the
planes and they're speaking in plain language. Brilliant, A plus
ten out of ten. He shows up, he leaves the
Plane Speaker and becomes her managing editor, and if you
can't tell by his last name, they soon get married.
(33:39):
And one of the reasons I like their relationship is
most of the time on this show, I cover some
man who did something really important, and then about three
quarters of the way through reading like this or that biography,
it's like, oh yeah, and he was like married, and
she did all the same stuff he did and did
literally as much work as he did, and we just
don't bother. I'm not even gonna put her name in
this book. Why would I give you that? You know,
(34:01):
this is a nice reversal of that, because he did
all of this shit too, and no one remembers him.
He was her co editor. They were like equals. They
ran it as a partnership. Everything I've read implies that
like she was kind of like, you know, like maybe
a little bit more of the like pants of the
family around it, right like m hmmhich is a weird,
(34:22):
horrible gendered phrase that I grew up with. But you know,
everything leaves him out in order to do the great
women of history theory.
Speaker 3 (34:31):
Hey, she bought the paper, she got that sketchy loan,
and she got the paper.
Speaker 2 (34:35):
I know she got it done. He showed up and
helped her do it. And you know he worked there
for twenty one years until he died in nineteen thirty four.
They were a power couple doing the hard work for
which she gets all the credit. And the thing I
like about it, I don't think he would have mind
it at all. No, Like I think I'm going to
have him as one of the great wife guys of
history who had no problem being overshadowed by his wife.
(35:00):
Under new ownership, the paper really found its voice. It
probably became the California Eagle. At this point it was
probably the Eagle already by that point. Ah, but if
it had been the California Owl, how history would have changed.
It never would have gone away. People would have been like,
that's such a sick title. It became a twenty page
weekly paper instead of a four page tabloid. And I
(35:23):
think for a long time she's writing the whole damn thing.
What I think. I know she's doing a lot of
the writing. I've seen it as the majority of the writing.
I don't know to what degree they're hiring people. Actually,
I do know by the nineteen twenties they had editors
and stuff working with them, so it's possible that by
the time they built up to this level they have employees.
(35:47):
And they take the paper very political. I think the
paper had always been political by simply existing, but she
became to focus it more on activist fight after activist fight,
one of the main things that they get credit for.
I thought, ask if you've ever seen but I haven't
actually seen it. You know, the film Birth of a
Nation from nineteen fifteen.
Speaker 3 (36:06):
I do, and I have not seen it either.
Speaker 2 (36:08):
I feel like I should hate watch it. At some point.
I just can't bring myself to do that to myself
with an evening.
Speaker 3 (36:13):
You know, it seems really boring too. I don't know.
Speaker 2 (36:16):
Yeah, yeah, it's true, like anything from nineteen fifteen is
going to be boring to watch now, but extra boring
if you're like, I just hate all these people. There
was a racist film called Birth of a Nation. It
came out nineteen fifteen. It is like literally one of
the masterpieces of just racist cinema that like went on
to inspire the Nazis and just is terrible. I have
nothing nice to say about it. It also is the
(36:37):
reason that KKK came back. And when it came out
in nineteen fifteen, the California Eagle was probably the first
paper to be, like, whoa the fuck y'all say this
terrible thing. It probably didn't phrase it that way. I
don't know how much they cust or didn't cuss. Most
people don't cuss when they write newspapers. This is why
I can't run a newspaper. And so black newspapers all
(36:58):
over the country started a campaign to get this movie
shut down and get it canceled out of various movie theaters,
and they did not entirely successfully, but a lot of
movie theaters canceled their showings and they limited the spread
of this propaganda, sometimes by people throwing bricks through windows
and responding to a movie you don't like by smashing
(37:19):
out the windows of the theater may seem extreme, but
this movie is, as I said, one of the greatest
pieces of white supremacist culture ever created. It's a celebration
of the original ku Klux Klan is directly responsible for
the rebirth of that organization, the second era of the KKK,
which is much larger than the original one and was
basically like a cultural institution and kind of a multi
(37:40):
level marketing scheme, which I learned about from Behind the Bastards.
Never heard of it, Sophy, I think you'd like it.
There's another podcast called Behind the Bastards. It's on the
same network, and they covered the KKK. It's like the
reverse of this show. It's like an uncool people did
uncool stuff, which is a ridiculous concept for a podcast,
but there you go, totally. And the Klan wasn't happy
(38:03):
about what she did. They hated this woman. They spent
years after her. In nineteen twenty five, she got a
hold of an internal memo of the California KKK that
had a plot to frame three black leaders for drinking
and driving. Like it was like, we're gonna sneak in
and put it at a half empty bottle of gin
(38:25):
in their car and then get them to crash, and
then everyone's gonna think black people are irresponsible and everyone's
gonna become racists and talk like this what dorks? Yeah,
and someone like the unspoken part of this, someone leaked
that shit to her.
Speaker 3 (38:42):
I think, like someone from the KKK.
Speaker 2 (38:45):
I don't know how she got the letter, right, I,
you know, unless she's going through their mail. I think
someone was like.
Speaker 3 (38:52):
Maybe one of them was like this is such a
stupid plan.
Speaker 2 (38:56):
Yeah, totally, it's just yeah, leak it. Yeah. So she
gets a hold of this internal memo from nineteen twenty
five and she publishes it in the newspaper, and it's
like this is what the KKK is trying to do.
And what's important to understand is that the KKK in
this point time, they're like legitimate, you like, you know,
(39:16):
it's like perfectly legal. It's not like it's not the
like later nineteen forties nineteen fifties where you're like hiding
your clan robes in the closet. This is like upstanding
business people. Right, this is like good old family whiteness
or whatever, as long as we all hate black people
and also other minorities, including Catholics for some odd reason.
Like and she's like, look at these pieces of shit
(39:39):
and publishes this. So the KKK sue her, the California
branch sue her from libel, and it was a criminal complaint.
She was facing a year in prison. She wrote, quote,
if to jail, we must go for publishing without malice
such propaganda as we, in common with all fair minded citizens,
(40:01):
believe prejudicial to good government. We go with a smile.
We go forward, unafraid, as we continue our steady march
for law and order, fighting every inch of the way
all things which retard our progress. So like, also she
could write I'm saying yeah, and she lost the case
(40:22):
in front of an all white court. I'm sorry, oh sorry,
the Klan. This is an important distinction. The clan is
a terrible reversal. They lost their case in front of
an all white court. Punkass because their argument was like,
we didn't write that, and they're like, yeah, you fucking
wrote that, and that's also that's not libel. Yeah, And
(40:43):
so the KKK they kept sending her threatening letters with
lots of nwords in them for some weird reason. They
didn't know they're not supposed to say that it's white people.
They like threatened her for years, and at one point
they like showed up and she like looks out, like
it's like a storefront kind of thing's got like full
play glass windows to the office. She like looks out
and there's like eight fucking clansmen outside, and so she's
just like, God, I got a gun around here somewhere,
(41:06):
like finds a gun. She does not shoot it. She
just pulls out a gun and like walks towards the window,
and they're like, oh, we're good, and they all leave.
Speaker 3 (41:14):
She's probably on deadline. She has an entire paper to
write herself.
Speaker 2 (41:18):
He's like like, please, and I have slept in two days.
I'm a fucking with you and I love okay. There's
a following back and forth that is quoted by La
mag And this is from a husband. This is a
marital conversation quote missus Bass, one of these days you're
going to get me killed. Her husband and co editor
(41:41):
Joseph Bass, would often say, mister Bass, it will be
in a good cause. She'd reply, he.
Speaker 3 (41:51):
Is an epic wife guy.
Speaker 2 (41:52):
You know, he's just like, ah, here we go again.
I married a badass.
Speaker 3 (41:58):
Oh, I love her, but she was going to get
me killed. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (42:03):
The paper also argued against segregation of the US military,
which famously they had to do twice during both World
Wars because, shamefully, even as the United States military was
invading Germany for being racist, they did so as racistly
as they could. By nineteen twenty five, they had a
circulation of sixty thousand, making it the most read black
(42:26):
paper in California. Here's a thing where I've read a
whole lot of different things in various directions. Later, the
circulation numbers near the end in the nineteen fifties are
going to be much lower than that. I've also read
that the Topeka Plain Dealer, the one that her husband left,
was the most read black newspaper west of the Mississippi,
but I am skeptical of it out selling the Eagle,
so that might have been before he left. I don't know.
(42:49):
She had a weekly column called on the Sidewalk, which
she used to talk about the need for civil rights,
not just for black Americans. She constantly spoke up for
like every ethnic minority in the United States. She talked
a lot about the Latino community. There was some stuff
that I eventually want to get into more when I
(43:09):
learn more about it, where there was like a big
roundup of like Mexican American teenage boys after a murderer,
and they were like all being blamed or whatever, like
hundreds of them or whatever the fuck, you know, So
she writes about that. She in World War Two, she
is one of the few people speaking out for an
end of the Japanese internment camps. And in nineteen thirty
(43:31):
The Eagle published their own editorial platform for everyone to see,
and I'm just going to read it. Good platform. Their
interests are quote the hiring of Negroes as a matter
of right rather than as a concession in those institutions
where their patronage creates a demand for labor. The increased
participation of Negroes and municipal, state, and national government. The
(43:53):
abolition of enforced segregation and all other artificial barriers to
the recognition of merit, the patronized of Negroes by Negroes
as a matter of principle, more rapid development of those
communities in which Negroes live by cooperation between citizens and
those who have business investments in such communities, and an
enthusiastic support for a greater degree of service at the
(44:16):
hands of all social, civic, charitable and religious organizations. And
so they're like, this is what we believe. If there's
a black business, if there's a business that relies on
black customers, it should hire black people, and that black people,
like we should be buying from stores that don't refuse
to sell whatever basic shit. And because of this radical stance,
(44:39):
she is going to spend thirty years being investigated by
the FBI.
Speaker 3 (44:45):
For this platform.
Speaker 2 (44:47):
The newspaper in its stances m h are what she's
going to be investigated for. But what's going to I'll
probably end up saying this again later in the script.
But one of the things that's neat funny bad Bad's
the word is that some of the FBI agents who
are like following her keep writing and being like, hey, boss,
she's not a communist. She says what she believes every
(45:10):
single week. We can read what she believes. This is
what she believes, And Jagger Hoover's like, not keep following her.
It's gonna slip. She's a communist. So it's like, this
is what she's after, right, She's very clear about it.
She doesn't have any problem with communists. That's also going
to come up because also in a real credit where
(45:30):
credit is due weigh whenever I'm talking about civil rights
in America before the civil rights movement, whenever we're talking
about like the nineteen twenties and thirties in particular, the
Communist Party is left out of the history because of
the red Scare right. The Communist Party was perhaps the
single most influential racially mixed organization fighting for black rights
(45:50):
in the nineteen twenties and nineteen thirties in the United States.
So a great deal of the people of all races
who are fighting for the same things as she was,
were committed card carrying communists. She just wasn't. And like
most of the media people we've covered on the show,
she was not afraid of new media. She started podcasting,
but on the radio, so backwards podcasting whatever they call that,
(46:14):
I don't know, whatever you call radio podcasting. She did
it six nights a week starting in nineteen thirty eight.
They ran a fifteen minute news show that they called
a newspaper of the air. Isn't it great?
Speaker 3 (46:28):
It's kind of whimsical.
Speaker 2 (46:29):
I love it, I know. And then by nineteen forty
they had the California Eagle Hour on Sundays on a
different radio station. It still Republican, even more Republicans. The
California Eagle Hour. You know, that's the where you want
to go to for news. What about the Owl Hour?
Speaker 3 (46:46):
I'll take the Owl Hour?
Speaker 2 (46:47):
What if it was our Owl Hour, like the one
that belongs to us, our Owl Hour?
Speaker 3 (46:54):
Welcome to our Owl Hour.
Speaker 2 (46:56):
Yeah, that's how they can figure out who's good and
at the radio podcasting. In order to do it is
that they can say all our.
Speaker 3 (47:06):
It's gonna be my next podcast.
Speaker 2 (47:09):
Hell yeah. But then she faced terrible repression, but she's
going to survive and fight back against and we're going
to talk about it on Wednesday. But first, one, if
you have any thoughts about this, I want to hear
them in Two, how can people hear more of what
you do?
Speaker 3 (47:28):
Well? One, thank you for introducing me to this incredible
woman and her incredible unnamed husband.
Speaker 2 (47:36):
I know I just say is yeah, but yeah, yeah,
oh you did. I've already forgotten blackburns in the middle anymore.
I don't even remember the first name. But okay, when
Blackburn's in your name, that's what I'm remembering. I can
only remember one name per person.
Speaker 3 (47:49):
Incredible story. I can't wait to find out what happens next.
If people want to listen to my podcast, just look
for unladylike and can conspiracy. She wrote, Yeah, I just
talk a lot about like women and gender and trying
to make sense of this this kooky old world. The
(48:11):
front of the pod.
Speaker 1 (48:11):
Bridget Todd has a new audiobook out and it is
called Love at First prompt AI in the Future of Intimacy.
Speaker 2 (48:20):
And don't worry. It's not going to convince you to
run out and get an AI girlfriend.
Speaker 1 (48:25):
No, No, this is trusted source friends.
Speaker 3 (48:28):
If there's anyone I trust yeah to tell me about
AI girlfriends, I do need to listen to this. It
is Bridget for sure.
Speaker 2 (48:34):
I kind of feel like it's like she's like the
only person I would trust with this story.
Speaker 3 (48:38):
One.
Speaker 2 (48:40):
Yeah, even the people I know and trust on the
like anti AI AI front, I like don't know if
I trust their like empathy around understanding complicated things, you know,
mm hmm. Anyway, Well, next, when this Wednesday, this very Wednesday,
talking about the rids and in the meantime, don't throw
(49:02):
each other under the bus, learn from history, stand up
against red scares, and take care of each other.
Speaker 3 (49:16):
Cool People Who.
Speaker 1 (49:17):
Did Cool Stuff is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more podcasts and cool Zone Media, visit our website
Goolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the five
or radio app, hop a Podcasts, or wherever you get
your podcasts.
Host
Margaret Killjoy
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