Pittsburgh Courier

Widely-circulated black newspaper, established in 1907 by Edwin Harleston, published by attorney Robert Lee Vann from 1910 until his death in 1940. Rose Wilder Lane wrote a column on issues of race, government, religion, equality, economy, and other subjects for several years in the early 1940s, when Ira Lewis was editor.

“Here in this country, the source of world revolution for human rights, actually teh only Americans who are consciously carrying on this revolution are Americans whose human rights have never been fully recognized for the fantastic reason that their skins are dark. Here am I, an American writer, who for 20 years has been trying–God knows with no help from American intellectuals–to see what is happening in this world; at last I discover the American revolution and for six years I write about it. But in all that time I never saw the American Negro. When I do, it is by the merest chance. I come upon The Courier, then it takes me half a summer to recover from the shock and know what I think. I am sure that there are millions of Maericans as blind and dumb as I was, whose reaction when they see it, will be like mine.” -Rose Wilder Lane to J.A. Rogers, Pittsburgh Courier, October 31, 1942.

Miss Lane

The fall 2010 issue of Independent Review includes David and Linda Beito’s article: “Selling Laissez faire Antiracism to the Black Masses: Rose Wilder Lane and the Pittsburgh Courier” (279-294). This week, several bloggers have mentioned Rose’s columns that appeared weekly from November 7, 1942 until September 8, 1945. The main article I saw via Google alerts is HERE. A note of interest: Rose was fired from her job at the Courier and wrote in a 1965 letter that she didn’t know why she had been fired. No explanation was given by the Courier for Rose’s abrupt disappearance.

Herbert Hoover Library has copies of around twenty columns that were apparently sent to Roger MacBride in 1975. I had copies of these in my files, but it wasn’t until I looked at the Pittsburgh Courier online archives that I realized I was missing over a hundred of Rose’s columns!

One blogger lamented the fact that Rose’s columns weren’t available to the reading public. Well, they are. The Courier online archives has several options that allow you to save and print the columns; the most it will cost you is under thirty bucks. You’ll also find a number of letters to the editor and other columns that mention both Laura Ingalls Wilder and daughter Rose, plus excellent book reviews. The archive service is through ProQuest, so if you have access via your public or school library, you may not have to pay even one thin dime for your own set of “Rose Lane Says” columns, all 136 of them.

Ive updated my bibliography to include the individual columns; search for Pittsburgh Courier and click on the page number at the end of each article to open the page on newspapers[.]com. Although the archive is a pay site, you can sign up for a free month, which should give you more than enough time to download or print out all of Rose’s articles. You’ll probably find a wealth of other LIW and RWL articles to justify a subscription.

In 2024, David Beito and Marcus Witcher published Rose Lane Says: Thoughts on Race, Liberty, and Equality, 1942-1945, a compilation of Rose’s Courier columns.

     

Pittsburgh Courier