And I'd never forgotten him or the Gnathonemus petersii weakly electric fish we worked on.

Whether or not he remembered me, it mattered very little-because the point really was to say out loud that which we sometimes only think to ourselves, which is how much we appreciate people who gave us time, gave us opportunities to figure out who we might be in the world. I found that not only satisfying, I found it exciting, and discovered my appetite for research. I enjoyed the long, lonely, very focused hours spent in the lab. The real import of that, and why I wrote to him, was to say that it was in his lab where I learned that I had what it took to be a researcher. But he was the person who let me work in his laboratory. Not so many years ago, I wrote, finally, to one of my college professors who had taught biopsychology. But that's in part because I can see the evidence of their influence on my own approach to teaching, to learning, and more. Well, you know, now that I'm a professor myself, I appreciate all my professors more than I probably ever did. And so it felt somehow that she insisted on a place-and got one-that was by virtue of an important turn of events, just a few weeks ago. So Charlotta Bass, in 2020, finally had an obituary in the New York Times. He called me late at night to say, “I think I'm going to write something,” and I was able to pull out my notes and have a terrific conversation with him.Īnd then just last week, the New York Times published an Overlooked No More on her. I was very fortunate that there was a Washington Post reporter who saw me squawking about this on Twitter. And that, of course, is not correct because Charlotta Bass is the first Black woman to have been nominated as the vice president, when she was, in 1952, on the Progressive Party ticket.

She could have fit in many chapters and as a consequence, she didn't fit in any one, squarely.Īnd that might have been fine and I might have forgotten about it except that a few weeks back when Senator Kamala Harris was going to be nominated for Joe Biden's running mate, it was said that she was the first Black woman to be nominated as a vice presidential candidate. In the editing I left her out I couldn't find a way to fit her very interesting and long life into the book. A fascinating life that included early years during which she was a great proponent of women's votes. She was a Californian, lived in Los Angeles for most of her life, and was the editor and owner of the California Eagle. And early on in the writing, I had created a set piece around a woman named Charlotta Bass. This is a good one because Vanguard is built around a series of vignettes, each of which turns on an individual woman.

Vanguard by martha jones