In the summer of 1936, Vann gave himself the assignment of reporting on the eighteen black athletes who competed for the United States at the Summer Olympics in Berlin. He interviewed a “grateful” Jesse Owens after he won the 100-yard dash—the second of Owens’s historic four gold medal victories. Even more satisfying, Vann described the surprise victory of a hometown boy: Johnny Woodruff, a nineteen-year-old University of Pittsburgh freshman and native of the nearby mining town of Connellsville, who escaped from inside a pack of runners to win the 800-meter race.
Seated directly below Vann in Berlin’s Olympic Stadium, in a box that jutted out from the stands, was Adolf Hitler. In Vann’s bullish stories for the Courier, he reported that Hitler “saluted” the U.S. athletes (likely a reference to the Nazi salute that Hitler extended to everyone) and that the German crowd went “literally crazy” for them. But in Vann’s letters home, he conveyed private bitterness at how the black Olympians had been treated. Hitler “found it convenient to leave the stadium” rather than shake their hands, he complained to one friend, while telling another that the German press had dismissed the gold medals as “points scored by the American African Auxiliary.”
When her husband returned from Berlin, Jesse Vann hosted a welcome-home picnic. It was held at their stately new residence: an eleven-room Tudor house surrounded by wide lawns and tall poplar trees in the wealthy Pittsburgh suburb of Oakmont that Vann had purchased for $50,000 from a white banker. Jesse invited the entire Courier staff: the editors, the ad salesmen, the circulation managers, the stenographers, the proofreaders, the bookkeepers, the pressmen, the mail clerks, even the janitor and the telephone operator. As everyone feasted on Chicken Maryland, potato salad, and Heinz pickles, Vann and Ira Lewis hailed the remarkable progress they had all achieved together in just a few short years. Boosted by coverage of the Ethiopian war, the Berlin Olympics, and the rise of Joe Louis, the Courier was now selling more than 200,000 copies across the United States, surpassing the circulation of all its top competitors combined (including its longtime rival The Chicago Defender, whose fortunes had plummeted with the declining health of Robert Abbott).
For the rest of the fall, Vann threw the Courier’s clout and his own personal influence behind Franklin Roosevelt’s bid for reelection. Showing how determined they were to win Pennsylvania, one of the few states FDR had lost in 1932, the Democrats held their convention in Philadelphia, and Vann was among thirty black delegates. While the Courier editorialized in favor of FDR, he traveled across the state as an official representative of the campaign and adviser on the Negro press. Most white newspapers forecast a close outcome in the state, but the Courier presciently predicted a sweeping Democratic victory. Roosevelt trounced Republican Alf Landon by 663,000 votes in Pennsylvania on the way to the most decisive Electoral College victory in U.S. history. Of the roughly 190,000 blacks who voted statewide, three out of four chose Roosevelt, contributing in particular to his wins in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh.
Yet once again, Vann didn’t receive the thanks he believed he deserved. Once the Democrats saw that they could capture black votes across the state, they turned to courting Negro leaders in Philadelphia, with its larger population. With Joe Guffey serving in the U.S. Senate, his ambitious protégé, David Lawrence, now in charge of the state party operation, began to assert his independence. The rift would break wide open in 1938, when Lawrence backed another candidate over Guffey for governor. When Lawrence’s man won the Democratic primary, Vann opted to endorse the Republican in the general election. Vann viewed it as a gesture of loyalty to Guffey, but Guffey didn’t see it that way. He publicly accused Vann of a “deceitful and dishonest” betrayal of the Democratic Party, and the two men rarely spoke again.
After the 1936 election, Vann grew increasingly vocal in his criticism of Roosevelt. Three issues in particular rankled him. One was FDR’s foot-dragging on anti-lynching legislation, which Vann viewed as a cowardly concession to Southern Democrats on Capitol Hill. The second was the president’s handling of the Supreme Court. After a reporter for the morning daily Pittsburgh Post-Gazette uncovered the fact that Hugo Black, FDR’s latest appointee, had once belonged to the Klu Klux Klan in his native Alabama, Vann became one of the strongest national voices calling for Black to step aside. Meanwhile, Vann’s high-minded opposition to FDR’s bid to “pack the Court” with additional justices was so eloquent that the Chicago Daily Tribune named one of his Courier essays on the subject its nationwide “Editorial of the Day.”
(For a brief period, Vann himself was touted as a potential Supreme Court candidate. A chorus that included H. L. Mencken, the Urban League, and the head of the National Bar Association urged Roosevelt to consider Vann as a counterweight to Hugo Black. As Mencken put it, “If the white Crackers of the South, in return for their votes, deserve to have a reliable agent on the Supreme Court, then why should the colored faithful of both North and South, not to mention East and West, be denied?” In letters to friends, Vann said he found it hard to take the idea seriously—no Negro had ever served as more than a messenger at the Supreme Court—but that he hoped the speculation might set a precedent. “We will never get anything of this kind until somebody is led to believe we ought to have it,” he wrote, “and I am letting my name be used solely for the purpose of creating a favorable impression toward the idea.”)
Vann’s third and most passionate cause was the future of blacks in the U.S. military. One day in early 1938, he summoned P.L. Prattis to give him a special assignment. Vann asked Prattis, as the only veteran among the Courier editors, to help him get a letter to dozens of military leaders, congressmen, newspaper editors, church leaders, and college presidents. In the letter, which he also published in the newspaper every week for two months, Vann listed all the military branches that excluded Negroes—“the air corps, the coast artillery corps, the tank corps, the engineer corps, the chemical warfare service, the field artillery, the signal or any of the other special services.” Then he solicited opinions about the best way to increase opportunities for black soldiers. “Do you believe that all branches of the army and naval service should be opened to Negroes?” the letter asked. “Or do you think there should be an entire Negro division, including all arms of the service and officered, at least in the line, by educated colored men, in the army; and a squadron manned by Negroes in the Navy?”
Over the following weeks, the Courier published dozens of responses to Vann’s survey. While views differed, a majority concluded the most realistic place to start was with a segregated Army division. (The more elitist Navy wasn’t ready for a black squadron, most agreed.) Armed with the feedback, Vann enlisted his old ally, Hamilton Fish, to introduce three bills in Congress to test the waters. The first called for opening all branches of the military to Negroes. The second proposed a full but separate Army division. A third demanded that two blacks per year be admitted to West Point for officer training. Fish sent a cable to Roosevelt asking for his support, and the president responded by inviting Vann to the White House for a courtesy call.
But opposition to what became known as “the Pittsburgh Courier bills” arose from an unlikely source. Walter White, the executive secretary of the NAACP, thought his organization should lead the fight for ending discrimination in the military, and that nothing short of full integration was acceptable. White’s deputy, Roy Wilkins, disagreed. Wilkins applauded the Courier for forcing the debate and thought that public hearings would benefit the cause. “Although we began the agitation years ago and have an excellent record on the question,” he wrote White, “the fact remains that the Courier at the psychological moment whipped up the enthusiasm of the country into a campaign which has assumed such proportions that this Association could not issue any statement which would seem to be ‘cold-watering’ the Courier’s crusade. I think you will realize how unpopular that would make us.” But White overruled Wilkins and lobbied quietly to kill what he privately belittled as the Courier’s proposal for a “Jim Crow division.�
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In late October 1938, Vann sought a second audience with Roosevelt. With his usual noncommittal bonhomie, FDR agreed that America might soon be forced to enlarge its military, and that a Negro division might be considered. But in the end, he did nothing to support the Fish legislation, in part because the anti–New Deal Republican had become such a thorn in Roosevelt’s side on other issues. Without backing from the White House, the “Pittsburgh Courier bills” never made it out of the House Military Affairs Committee, where twelve of twenty-six members were Southerners.
Vann refused to give up on his military crusade, however. With his own money, he funded a group called the Committee for Participation of Negroes in the National Defense to lobby for more gradual reforms. In 1940, he finally won a victory as Congress began implementing a mandatory draft. With Vann’s encouragement, Fish proposed an amendment to the Selective Training and Service Act that stated “no Negro because of race should be excluded from the enlistment in the army for service with colored military units now organized or to be organized for such service.” After the bill cleared the House by a margin 121 to 99, the Courier congratulated itself for the breakthrough, declaring that it took “pardonable pride” in “the fact that PARTIAL success has been won in the fight to secure participation of Negroes in national defense.”
For P.L. Prattis, 1940 was shaping up as a particularly gratifying year. He and his new bride, Helen Sands, had moved into a small brick house on Junilla Street in the Hill District. After a year of marriage, they began trying to have children, a step that would result a year later in the birth of a daughter they named Patricia. At work, Prattis had been given his own weekly column, entitled “The Horizon,” in addition to his editing duties. In May, he wrote his friend Claude Barnett in Chicago to share the good news that he had been promoted to managing editor. “This is the first time anybody but Mr. Vann or Mr. Lewis has served in that capacity,” Prattis explained proudly.
Five months later, Prattis learned very different news that shattered his newfound sense of security. Until then, Robert Vann had told only a few of his oldest associates at the Courier that he had been diagnosed with abdominal cancer. Vann had quietly undergone surgery to have the growth removed. Still frail from the operation, he had willed himself to attend both of that summer’s presidential conventions to lobby for the cause of black servicemen. In Philadelphia, the Republicans nominated Indiana businessman Wendell Willkie and adopted a platform declaring “discrimination in the Civil Service, Army, Navy, and all other branches of the government must cease.” In Chicago, where Roosevelt was selected to run for a third term, the Democrats paid lip service to civil rights for the first time since Reconstruction, but failed to address the military question beyond commending Negro soldiers for their “achievements” in past wars.
Returning to Pittsburgh, Vann told his editors that the Courier would endorse Willkie. Some of his reasons were personal: Vann was opposed in principle to a third presidential term. He approved of Willkie as a fellow self-made businessman, and he hadn’t forgotten the slights he had suffered in FDR’s Washington. But most of all, Vann couldn’t forgive Roosevelt’s seeming indifference to the millions of blacks who had voted for him. A letter to Mary McLeod Bethune, a member of FDR’s “Black Cabinet,” about the plight of Southern farmers captured Vann’s annoyance. “You cannot afford to travel around the country and talk about the blessings of the New Deal unless there are some real blessings to talk about,” he wrote Bethune. “The Negro Farmers of the South are not getting the benefits intended for them . . . . The President has a fine attitude, but attitude is not bread and butter. Attitude is not corn and wheat. Attitude is not pork and potatoes.”
On days that Vann came to work at the Courier, he had a custom of swinging by the newsroom to greet his reporters. “Hey gang!” he would call out. But on an October morning in 1940, he went straight to his office and called for Julia Bumry Jones, his old friend and one of the first employees he had hired twenty-five years earlier. “Rose,” Vann said gravely, using his pet nickname for Jones, “I have to make my plans for the future. I have tried to build the Courier so it will live on without me. Now, there are some things we must face, regardless of how we feel . . .”
Vann’s voice began to break, and Julia’s eyes welled up as she realized what he was saying. His cancer had returned. Jones began to weep. “Now, have your cry,” Vann said, “but listen to me . . .” For the next half hour, they talked about how the Courier would carry on. They reminisced about the days when it had been just the three of them—Robert Vann, Ira Lewis, and Julia Bumry Jones—and a handful of others. Recalling the conversation, Jones invoked the motto of the National Association of Negro Women: Vann and Lewis were always “climbing, climbing and lifting as they climbed,” she wrote. “They started with the three of us and kept adding until there were more than a hundred. It was a long pull and a hard pull . . . [until] they reached the top of the hill.”
It was Vann’s last day at the Courier. Shortly afterward, he checked into Shadyside Hospital, and within days he slipped into a coma. “Don’t worry about me, I’ll be all right,” he said in his last words to his wife, Jesse, who was at his bedside. Two days later, minutes after seven in the evening on Thursday, October 24, 1940, Robert Lee Vann passed away, less than two months past his sixty-first birthday.
The next issue of the Courier was a monument to Vann’s legacy, in more ways than one. There was a front-page story, “NATION EULOGIZES VANN,” and seven pages of obituaries, tributes, and photos. But there was also another headline that Vann had helped make possible: “DAVIS FIRST NEGRO GENERAL.” In one of his last acts as editor, Vann had published a letter from a Courier reader protesting the Army’s failure to include a black officer, Benjamin O. Davis, in a group of colonels promoted to general. The oversight had become an eleventh-hour election issue, and on the day after Vann died Roosevelt had promoted Davis to brigadier general, making him the first Negro to hold such a high rank. The Courier’s editorial writers welcomed the news, but it didn’t stop them from obeying Vann’s final wish and endorsing Wendell Willkie. “This last minute desperate maneuver will not swing a single Negro vote,” they declared, “if, as seems likely, it was designed to snare needed support.”
As it turned out, FDR didn’t need the Courier’s backing in 1940. While a handful of other black newspapers joined it in supporting Willkie, most of the Negro press endorsed Roosevelt—including The Chicago Defender for the first time, now that the staunchly Republican Robert Abbott had died and left his nephew John Sengstacke in charge. Across the country, two out of three Negro votes went to Roosevelt. In Pennsylvania, FDR won every district with a sizable black population, and on the Hill he captured four out of five black ballots. In the end, the political migration that Robert L. Vann had started in 1932 had overtaken the philosophy behind it. The black vote was no longer the “liquid asset” that Vann envisioned but a fixed resource for the Democratic Party, and it would remain so for the rest of the century and well into the next.
Respectful of faith but frequently critical of the black clergy, Vann had left instructions that his funeral be held not in a church but at his beloved property in Oakmont. Hundreds of mourners attended, from leaders of the Negro press such as John Sengstacke of the Defender and Claude Barnett of the Associated Negro Press, to scores of influential politicians, businessmen, ministers, and scholars from across the country. Floral tributes were sent by Gus Greenlee, Joe Guffey, Joe Louis and his managers John Roxborough and Julian Black, and hundreds of other admirers. Chester Washington delivered a eulogy and Reverend C. E. Askew, a boyhood friend from North Carolina, recalled Vann’s early hardships. From Oakmont, a caravan of cars followed the hearse bearing Vann’s casket to Homewood Cemetery, where he had purchased a huge stone mausoleum decorated with stained-glass figures that symbolized his three passions: the Book of Knowledge, the Scales of Justice, and the Gutenberg Press.
After the Reverend Charles Foggie, an AME Zion past
or from the Hill, conducted a gravesite service, P.L. Prattis and dozens of other mourners stayed behind to walk through the mausoleum and share tears, hugs, and memories. For Prattis, it was a moment for solemn reflection but also for apprehension about the future—about how he would get along with the Courier’s old guard now that Vann was gone, and about what lay ahead for all of them as the country inched ever closer to war.
• • •
SEVERAL MONTHS AFTER ROBERT L. VANN’S death, P.L. Prattis embarked on a mission to carry on his mentor’s legacy. In a leadership shuffle at the Courier, Prattis had relinquished his managing editor duties to Bill Nunn, who everyone agreed was better suited to running the newsroom from day to day. Prattis had assumed a new title of executive editor, freeing him to write and report and also take over Vann’s old role as an ambassador to the powers-that-be in Washington. In that capacity, Prattis sought the War Department’s permission to make another tour of segregated Army bases across the country. In a series of articles in the spring and summer of 1941, Prattis identified some disturbing new trends: the Army was randomly assigning black enlistees to combat and noncombat roles, for example, without regard to their level of education or literacy. But he also found promising developments, such as an increase in officer training and the use of Negro doctors and nurses on segregated bases for the first time.
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