Founder’s Statement

The Charlotta Bass Journalism & Justice Lab brings the research
that I have conducted for the last decade to life.

Since 2011, I have been studying how Black people use mobile journalism to push their own urgent dispatches into mainstream headlines. In my 2020 book, Bearing Witness While Black: African Americans, Smartphones and the New Protest #Journalism, I argue that today’s smartphone citizen journalists, like Darnella Frazier, are continuing the work of Black witnesses before them, like Ida B. Wells and Frederick Douglass. Throughout each of America’s overlapping eras of domestic terror – slavery, lynching and police brutality – there have been Black people leveraging the technology of their day to demand change.

Thirty years ago, police beat Rodney King on camera, just a few miles from USC. Farther north, in Oakland, citizen journalists filmed police shooting Oscar Grant at Fruitvale Station in 2009. For West Coast natives, these men were part of a longer narrative arc about police brutality, which extended to the Watts riots of 1965 and the subsequent rise of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense in 1966. When George Floyd was murdered in 2020, I had a front-row seat to the West Coast’s resurrection as a nexus for activism. For more than 100 days, Portland, Seattle, Oakland, San Francisco and Los Angeles hosted the most steadfast demonstrations in the whole nation – and this was no accident.

As I interviewed frontline activists, I learned more and more about the heritage of Black activism on the West Coast. I learned that the nation’s first attempts at bussing to integrate schools happened out West. I learned how other social movements, such as the Brown Berets, patterned their organization after the Black Panther Party. I met generations of Black activist families, who had passed down the baton – from Watts, to the LA protests of 1992, to Black Lives Matter’s third wave in 2020. 

The West Coast has been at the forefront of Black social justice for more than 100 years.

Amid all these swirling connections, my colleagues and other trusted community members began to share news clippings with me. Black elders in LA sent me pictures of lost Black Panther newspapers. I found Stokely Carmichael letters in a banker’s box in USC’s library. And then, the New York Times published a long-overdue obituary on Charlotta Bass – the first Black woman to own and operate a newspaper on the West Coast. As I read about this remarkable leader, I marveled at how she predated Vice President Kamala Harris in her bid for the same job. Why, I wondered, had I not learned more about her in school? And, what should I do with all the Black testimonies and archival media that were coming my way?

Thus, the idea that had been bubbling for many months began to take shape in my mind. What if, I thought, there was a hub for Black social justice media? The West Coast had no clearinghouse that connected the narrative dots between Black people’s abolitionist media activism during the Gold Rush, to Charlotta Bass’s Great Migration-era editorial leadership, down through history to the Black Panther Party, until today’s Black Lives Matter movement. Moreover, there was no center where people could come and learn how to consume or report on social justice issues with greater media literacy.

It is my hope that the Charlotta Bass Journalism & Justice Lab will become the destination for such things. Our goal is to save, study and share Black social justice journalism from the West Coast. After all, the West Coast has been at the forefront of Black social justice for more than 100 years. One of its first documentarians was a Black woman – like me – who knew the power of strong journalism. I look forward to sharing how Mrs. Bass’s spirit – and her descendants’ love – inspired me to honor her work this way. This Lab will empower generations of students to report on the issues about which she cared most. We will create knowledge that will help our industry engage in reparative journalism. And, we will help the public think about Black people in the news through different lenses. Thank you for supporting this important work.

Warm regards,