PBS Honors Unsung Female Black Heroes in Unladylike2020 - Series Finale Profiling Charlotta Spears Bass Airs August 26
The series finale to Unladylike2020, an innovative multimedia series launching in honor of the 100th anniversary of women’s suffrage recently aired on August 26 with the profile on Charlotta Spears Bass, one of the first African American women to own and operate a newspaper, and the first African American woman to run for Vice President of the United States.
Charlotta Spears Bass (1874-1969), a crusading newspaper editor and politician, was one of the first African American women to own and operate a newspaper in the United States. She followed earlier decades of ‘muckraking’ or reform-minded journalism, publishing the California Eagle in Los Angeles from 1912 until 1951, at a time when newsrooms were male-dominated and few white journalists focused on issues of importance to African Americans. In the pages of the California Eagle, she addressed the racism of D.W. Griffith's film The Birth of A Nation, the Ku Klux Klan, LA’s discriminatory hiring practices, police brutality, and restrictive housing covenants. Later in her career, Bass entered electoral politics and was the first African American woman to run for Vice President of the United States in 1952, on the Progressive Party ticket. Confirmed interviewees: historian Susan D. Anderson, director of Library, Collections, Exhibitions, and Programs at the California Historical Society; journalist and political commentator, Amy Holmes.
During Women’s History Month, PBS’s American Masters illuminated the inspiring stories of little-known American heroines from the early years of feminism and the women who now follow in their footsteps with Unladylike2020. Narrated by Julianna Margulies (The Good Wife; ER; Billions) and Lorraine Toussaint (Selma; Orange is the New Black; The Glorias), American Masters – Unladylike2020 spotlighted 26 diverse changemakers, in 26 documentary shorts premiering Wednesdays, beginning March 4 through August 26, Women’s Equality Day, on the American Masters YouTube channel.
Some of the women featured include Bessie Coleman, the first African American to earn an international pilot's license; Susan La Flesche Picotte, the first Native American physician who also founded a hospital on the Omaha Reservation; Jeannette Rankin, the first woman elected to the U.S. Congress; Gertrude Ederle, the first woman to swim across the English Channel; Sissieretta Jones, the first African American to sing opera on the main stage at Carnegie Hall; and Lois Weber, the first woman to direct a feature-length film, among many others. To learn more about all the women featured in the series, visit pbs.org/unladylike2020.