Coastal Connections: Charlotta Bass, Martin Luther King, and Cesar Chavez
Martin Luther King Jr. Cesar Chavez. Charlotta Bass. You’re probably familiar with one or two of these names—names belonging to three seemingly unrelated icons of the American civil rights movement. However, on closer inspection, you will find that their influence overlapped in more ways than one. History is a web, not a straight line. We invite you to take a look at the web spun by these three icons that shaped the nation.
Charlotta Bass: The Foundation
Charlotta Spears Bass was a ground-breaking journalist, politician, and civil rights leader. Born in the 1870s, she worked selling newspaper subscriptions on the East Coast. At 36, she moved to California, where she became a journalist for The California Eagle newspaper. She purchased The Eagle in 1912, making her the first African American woman to own and operate a newspaper. The California Eagle covered topics like police brutality, housing segregation, and voter rights. Bass’s work as an editor and columnist gained The Eagle a cult following among California’s Black communities. Her focus on multi-ethnic politics led The Eagle to champion the rights of not only African-Americans, but also Asians, Latinos, and Indigenous communities alike.
A notable example of Bass’s advocacy was her support of the Bruce Family, who faced seizure of their land along the California coastline, which they had purchased and turned into a resort for African-Americans. At a time when most beachfront properties were White-owned and most public spaces were racially-segregated, the state strong-armed the Bruces into shutting down the resort. Bass covered the events in The Eagle as a reflection of the larger issue of segregation and land rights plaguing California. Although the Bruce family did not recover the land until 2022, Bass’s news coverage helped create a public movement to end restrictive racial covenants that blocked Black people from owning land.
Bass did not stop at platforming change; she fought for change herself. In 1951, she sold the Eagle to focus on her political career. She was active in organizations like the NAACP and was nominated to run for Vice President of the United States of America by the Progressive Party in 1952. Though she didn’t win the election, she made history as the first Black woman to ever run for the second-highest office in the country under a major political party.
Though she was not born on the West Coast, Bass stayed a Californian at heart, dedicating her life to telling the stories and representing the people who struggled the most.
Martin Luther King Jr.’s California Influence
If you’ve studied the American civil rights movement, you’ve heard of Martin Luther King Jr. Born in Atlanta in 1929, he was a civil rights activist and Christian Baptist minister known for his non-violent approach to challenging systemic racism. Growing up in the segregated South, he faced frequent racial discrimination, which caused him to harbor a hatred towards White people as a young man. This mindset changed when he visited the desegregated North to work and eventually continue his studies, witnessing how people of all races could live side by side.
As a young man, he pursued academics seriously and began to take part in acts of civil disobedience, including sit-ins and protests, leading to multiple arrests. He used his popularity and public-speaking talent to gather support for his causes, notably delivering his famous “I Have a Dream” speech during the 1963 March on Washington. His influence was felt across the nation, including California.
In 1960, he led 5,000 protesters in a rally at the Democratic National Convention, held at the Los Angeles Sports Arena, to push the Democratic Party to prioritize the civil rights cause. As a result, the party committed to enforcing the Civil Rights Act of 1957 and the Civil Rights Act of 1960. That same year, King supported a group of Black students by joining a sit-in protest against racial discrimination at the F.W. Woolworth lunch counter on Broadway in downtown Los Angeles. His contribution sparked the success of the ongoing movement against racial segregation in public eateries. In 1967, King gave a speech at the Great Issues Forum held at the University of Southern California. During this speech, the auditorium was bombed and evacuated. Unfazed, King continued his speech once police cleared out the area and ensured safety. These are only a handful of instances in which Martin Luther King Jr. stood in the face of violent opposition to the civil rights cause.
Like Charlotta Bass, he was surveilled by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) under suspicion of Communist ties. Unlike Bass, he did not live to see old age. He was assassinated at age 39.
Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers
Cesar Chavez was a boundary-pushing Mexican-American labor leader and civil rights activist. Born in Arizona in 1927, his family moved to California when he was a child to work as migrant laborers after losing their farm during the Great Depression. Following in their footsteps, Chavez worked as a farm laborer in both California and Arizona, and briefly served in the U.S. Navy during World War II. In California, Chavez joined the Community Service Organization (CSO), a grassroots civil rights organization promoting Latino rights in the region. He traveled through California advocating for workers’ rights, helping Mexican Americans register to vote and access legal support for immigration issues.
He rose through the ranks and became the national director of the CSO in 1959, leaving in 1963 to co-found the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA) with Dolores Huerta and Gilbert Padilla. The NFWA ran an insurance scheme, a credit union, and El Malcriado, a Spanish/English bilingual newspaper for farmworkers. Like Charlotta ass, Chavez recognized the importance of connecting people through the written word. Chavez is perhaps best known for leading protests during the five-year Delano Grape Strike in California, backed by the NFWA starting in 1965. The strike demanded better working conditions and pay for Mexican and Filipino-American workers, and across America, countless households stopped eating grapes in support of the cause. The long, drawn-out strike finally ended in union contracts being signed for the benefit of workers.
In 1966, the NFWA merged with an American Federation of Labor–Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO) group to form the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee, which became the United Farm Workers (UFW). Chavez continued to represent workers’ rights, leading numerous protests, negotiating deals, and giving speeches until his death from natural causes at age 66.
Points of Convergence
If you’ve been paying attention, you may have noticed several similarities between the actions of these three civil rights leaders. As aforementioned, history is a web, and here is where its threads meet.
Although Bass and King belonged to different generations and never directly communicated, much of their work intersected. Decades before King first took public stages to decry segregation, Bass had laid the groundwork through her journalistic career, and later through politics. We must remember that the civil rights movement lasted more than one lifetime, and no one person could have defeated discrimination without standing on the shoulders of those before them. Our society would not have the win at W. F. Woolworth without first suffering the loss of Bruce Beach.
On the other hand, King and Chavez did directly interact. Towards the end of the Delano Grape Strike, Chavez went on a food strike, inspired by the acts of Gandhi. King wrote to Chavez during this time to express admiration for Chavez’s commitment and endurance. Like Bass, Chavez was committed to championing the causes of all the downtrodden, evident by his insistence that Filipino and Mexican-Americans join forces to strike together. Like King, Chavez was committed to nonviolence, asking workers to vow to strike only peacefully despite pushback. The more you read into history, the more you notice these repetitive thought patterns, one influencing the other.
Like those before us, we intend to do our part to fight for justice.
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