She became the first Black woman to own a newspaper in 1912 – then used it to expose the KKK. They came to her office. She pulled out a gun.

In 1912, when Charlotta Bass bought the California Eagle newspaper for $50 at a public auction, community leaders in Los Angeles told her she was making a mistake. Who had ever heard of a woman running a newspaper?

Ministers came to her office to offer advice. The previous owner, they reminded her, had worked himself to death trying to make the paper succeed. How did this young woman think she could do what he had failed to do? Charlotta listened politely.

Then she changed the paper’s name, hired a staff, and got to work doing exactly what they said was impossible. For the next 40 years, the California Eagle became one of the most powerful Black newspapers in America – and Charlotta Bass became one of the most feared journalists on the West Coast.

Not because she was loud. Because she published the truth.

Charlotta Amanda Spears was born in South Carolina in 1874, the sixth of eleven children. In her twenties, she moved to Rhode Island, where she worked selling subscriptions for a Black newspaper called the Providence Watchman.

In 1910, at age 36, she moved to Los Angeles for her health. She took a job selling subscriptions for the California Owl, a small Black newspaper that provided housing information, job listings and news for Black settlers heading west.

When the founder, John Neimore, fell ill in 1912, he asked Charlotta to take over as editor. She had never run a newspaper. She had no formal journalism training. She was a Black woman in an industry dominated by white men. She said yes anyway.

When Neimore died later that year, Charlotta bought the paper, renamed it the California Eagle, and turned it into something Los Angeles had never seen before: a publication that refused to pretend racism didn’t exist.

In 1914, she hired Joseph Blackburn Bass, an experienced journalist from Kansas, to help edit the paper. They married a year later. Joseph became the editor; Charlotta remained the publisher and the voice that set the tone. And the tone was uncompromising.

That same year, director D.W. Griffith released Birth of a Nation, a film that portrayed the Ku Klux Klan as heroes and Black Americans as threats to white civilisation. It was a massive hit. Theatres across the country showed it to sold-out audiences.

The California Eagle launched a campaign to ban it.

Charlotta published editorials calling the film what it was: propaganda designed to justify racial terror. She joined forces with other Black newspapers across the country, pushing cities to refuse to screen the film.

Some cities listened. Birth of a Nation was banned in several communities because of campaigns led by Black publishers like Charlotta Bass. But the fight against the film was just the beginning.

Throughout the 1920s, the California Eagle exposed police brutality with front-page headlines like Trigger-Happy Cop Freed after Slaying Youth.

It documented housing discrimination, publishing maps of neighbourhoods where Black families were barred from buying homes. It covered employment discrimination at hospitals, transit companies, telephone companies and construction projects.

Charlotta didn’t just report on injustice. She organised against it.

She co-founded the Home Protective Association to fight restrictive housing covenants. She led Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work campaigns, pressuring white-owned businesses to hire Black employees. She served on the board of the NAACP and became co-president of the Los Angeles chapter of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association.

And she took on the Ku Klux Klan.

In 1925, Charlotta published a letter signed by G.W. Price, the leader of the California Klan. The letter detailed a plot to kill three of Los Angeles’s most effective Black leaders by staging fake traffic accidents and having them falsely convicted of drunk driving.

Price was furious. He sued Charlotta and the California Eagle for libel, claiming he hadn’t written the letter. If convicted, Charlotta faced a year in prison and a $5,000 fine. She refused to retract the letter.

“If to jail we must go for publishing without malice such propaganda as we in common with all fair-minded citizens believe prejudicial to good government,” she wrote, “we go with a smile.”

The case went to trial in front of an all-white court. The courtroom was packed with spectators. The Klan was confident they would win. The judge sided with Charlotta Bass. The California Klan was humiliated. And furious.

They began calling her at all hours of the day and night. Threatening her. Warning her to stop. One day, eight men in white robes showed up at the California Eagle office.

Charlotta opened her desk drawer, pulled out a pistol and pointed it at them. They left.

Her husband, Joseph, often worried about their safety.

“Mrs Bass,” he would say, “one of these days you are going to get me killed.”

“Mr Bass,” she would reply, “it will be in a good cause.”

By the mid-1920s, the California Eagle had become the largest Black newspaper on the West Coast, employing twelve workers and publishing twenty pages a week. It had a circulation of nearly 60,000 readers.

In 1934, Joseph Bass died unexpectedly. Charlotta was left to run the paper alone. She incorporated the newspaper, brought in a board of directors, and kept publishing.

Through the 1930s and 1940s, the California Eagle continued to expose what mainstream media refused to cover. When nine Black teenagers were falsely accused of rape in Scottsboro, Alabama, Charlotta covered the case and supported the “Scottsboro Boys.” When Black soldiers from the Twenty-Fourth Infantry were unjustly convicted after the 1917 Houston race riot, the California Eagle championed them.

But by the late 1940s, Charlotta’s activism had attracted the attention of the FBI. They placed her under surveillance, claiming her newspaper was seditious. In 1950, she was called before the California Legislature’s Joint Fact-Finding Committee on Un-American Activities and accused of being a Communist.

The accusations took a toll. Her ability to sell the newspaper suffered. Her effectiveness in the community was questioned.

In 1951, after nearly 40 years, Charlotta Bass wrote her last column for the California Eagle and sold the paper. But she wasn’t done fighting.

In 1952, at age 78, Charlotta Bass became the first Black woman nominated for Vice President of the United States, running on the Progressive Party ticket with attorney Vincent Hallinan.

She had no illusions about winning. Her campaign slogan was: “Win or lose, we win by raising the issues.”

She campaigned across the country, speaking about civil rights, workers’ rights, housing discrimination and police brutality – the same issues she had covered in the California Eagle for four decades.

Dwight Eisenhower won the election. Charlotta Bass returned to California, retired to Elsinore, and spent her final years operating a library and voter registration centre out of her garage.

She published her memoir, Forty Years: Memories from a Newspaper, in 1960. She suffered a stroke in 1966 and died in 1969 at age 95.

The California Eagle continued publishing until 1964, making it one of the oldest Black-owned newspapers in American history.

Charlotta Bass understood power long before she was allowed to run for it. She understood that journalism could be a weapon against injustice. That a printing press in the right hands could expose what powerful people wanted hidden. That refusing to soften the truth was more important than gaining access to people who controlled the narrative.

She was told women couldn’t run newspapers. She bought one anyway. She was told to stop publishing stories about police brutality, housing discrimination, and the Klan. She published them anyway.

She was threatened, sued, investigated, and harassed.

She pulled out a gun and kept going.

Because Charlotta Bass knew something that every journalist who has ever been told to stay quiet already knows: The truth doesn’t need permission. It just needs someone brave enough to print it. For 40 years, Charlotta Bass was that person.

And the California Eagle was the proof that one woman with a printing press could change a city, challenge a system, and refuse to let power define what could be said.

She didn’t wait to be allowed to speak. She bought a newspaper and spoke anyway.

• A Tell Media report / Credit: The Way We Were