At eleven he was hired to sell hats for Holley & Brother in Methuen, Massachusetts, where he attended more school.

[1] Chase married Arabella McCabe on January 28, 1886,[3] and the couple had a son, William Calvin, Jr. and Beatriz, both of whom eventually worked at the Bee.

Frederick Douglass was at that time United States Marshal and initially desired to have Chase work in his office.

Chase then started attacking Douglass in his writing,[4] but the pair eventually reconciled and became close friends.

[3] Soon after taking up editorship of the Bee, Chase also attended classes at Howard University Law School in 1883–1884.

Continuing his editorial duties, Chase did not take a law degree and maintained his legal studies privately.

Post-Civil War Redeemers acquired political control over many U.S. states; with the goal of reversing many of the limited desegregation gains that had been made during the Civil War and Reconstruction, the Redeemers proclaimed a policy of Jim Crow and implicit support for lynching.

The Bee attempted to crusade against these trends, leveraging its support base in the comparatively well-educated African-American community of Washington, D.C. For several years, Chase editorialized against lynching and against the Atlanta Compromise positions taken by fellow African-American leader Booker T.

For example, Washington used his political influence with Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft to try to remove Lafayette M. Hershaw and Freeman H. M. Murray from their government positions and spy on meetings of the Niagara Movement headed by W. E. B. DuBois in 1905 and 1906.

When instructing the jury, the judge stated:[6] [E]ven if the defendant should prove the truth of every charge against Taylor, he would then have to show to the entire satisfaction of the jury that he had published the charges with good motives and justifiable ends.In addressing Chase's motives, the judge said that only the president could remove Taylor from his appointed office.

[1] Chase attempted to respond to these dismal trends by building an editorial alliance with the newly formed National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

[1] William Calvin Chase was posthumously honored by memorial resolution 16-187 of the Council of the District of Columbia, adopted on February 7, 2006.

The resolution cited Chase's historical significance as one of the first journalistic champions of Frederick Douglass in the African-American press, and Chase's organization of the movement to achieve the historic preservation of Douglass's later-life home, Cedar Hill.

Published by the University of Pennsylvania Press, the examination of the fighting editor's life is an expanded Ph.D dissertation.