Rose Wilder Lane—novelist, journalist, founding mother of the modern libertarian movement, and very likely uncredited co-author of her mother Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House on the Prairie books—was also, less famously, a columnist in the early 1940s for the largest black newspaper in the United States.
Lane first learned about The Pittsburgh Courier in spring 1941 from a black woman who worked for her. After taking out a subscription, she sent a fan letter and an article submission to Joel A. Rogers, one of the paper's columnists. Rogers, a self-taught popularizer of black history, was instrumental in getting her hired as a regular contributor. She wrote for the paper from 1942 to 1945, and the authors of this article have compiled most of her Courier columns in a forthcoming book, titled Rose Lane Says.
