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Vote Negroes into Office.
Philadelphia, [1952]. Broadside, 14” x 8.5”. CONDITION: Good, horizontal crease at center, two .25” chips to left edge. [with] New York: Progressive Party, 1952. Mimeograph, 14” x 8.5”, 2 pp. CONDITION: Very good, horizontal crease at center, some offsetting/toning to first page. Two scarce pieces of ephemera recording African American candidates for national and state office, including the first African American woman to ever be nominated as a Vice Presidential candidate. The broadside, “VOTE NEGROES INTO OFFICE,” provides instructions for Philadelphia voters to elect African Americans to represent them in national office and the state legislature. A column on the left lists the candidates—including Charlotta A. Bass for Vice President—and indicates their parties and the rows and lines on which their names would appear on the ballot. Instructional text to the right directs voters not to “TOUCH ANY OF THE BIG HANDLES on the voting machine,” but instead to “pull down the small levers under the names of the candidates…and swing back the curtain. That’s all!” Additional text reminds the electorate of which districts and wards each candidate would represent, (“EVERY Voter in the 4th Congressional District Can Vote for BASS and WIDAMEN,” “EVERY VOTER in the 32nd Ward can Vote for MONROE or THOMPSON,” and so on). Finally, the broadside advertises a broadcast of Widamen on “Monday Nov. 3rd 8:30 P.M.,” on the station WHAT (“1340 on your Radio Dial”), which in the 1940s became first in the U.S. to hire a full-time Black announcer. The typescript is a press release “Biography of Mrs. Charlotta A. Bass” (1874–1969) outlining “her campaign as vice-presidential candidate of the Progressive Party” as “the first Negro woman ever to be named for a high political office by any party.” After being “chosen unanimously by the Progressive Party Convention in Chicago…as running mate of Vincent Hallinan, West Coast labor lawyer who is the Progressive Party’s candidate for president,” Bass undertook a four-week speaking tour through “Milwaukee, Detroit, Chicago, Indianapolis, Pittsburgh, Dayton, and Cleveland.” Regarding her background as a “lifelong fighter for the rights of her people,” the release states that “for forty years, Mrs. Bass was the…publisher and editor of the ‘California Eagle,’ the oldest Negro newspaper on the West Coast…Her long career…was marked by a sequence of battles for the rights of the Negro people and other minority groups, many of which resulted in victories.” The memorandum also describes Bass as a rebel “against the Republican Party,” since she had voted against a “native fascist, William E. Ricker” in 1942, and expressed her discontent “over their refusal to fight for civil rights.” Accordingly, in 1949, Bass became “a founding member of the Progressive Party,” and in 1950, “her candidacy for Congress in the 14th district of Los Angeles on the…Independent Progressive Party Ticket amassed over 13,000 votes in a short, six–weeks campaign.” OCLC records just a single holding of this broadside, at Cornell. We locate another example at Beinecke. The press release biography is apparently unrecorded, and does not seem to have been published in contemporary newspapers. REFERENCES: “15 Negroes Seek Assembly Seats,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, November 2, 1952, p. 32.For Immediate Release : Biography of Mrs. Charlotta A. Bass.
Item #9443
Price: $575.00
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