The career of Robert L. Vann combined journalism, law, politics, and civil rights activism with varying degrees of success. Vann rose from rural Southern poverty to become a struggling black lawyer in Pittsburgh, and fell into journalism when friends asked him to draw up incorporation papers for a black weekly they were trying to establish. Vann was soon forced to take over the paper himself, and after years of struggle, he built the Pittsburgh Courier into the leading black weekly in the United States. Shrewdly using the newspaper to advance his law career, he tried to parlay his success in both fields into prominence in politics and civil rights leadership. In these endeavors he achieved some success, but also met with frustration and disappointment. His personality a complex mixture of conservatism, optimism, idealism, and opportunism, Vann switched political allegiances when it seemed to him expedient to do so...