A Force for Change: Beatrice Morrow Cannady and the Struggle for Civil Rights in Oregon, 1912-1936

Introduction

A Force for Change 2 she loved: reading a book. We will never know what volume she was holding with such care—perhaps a book of poetry by Paul Laurence Dunbar, one of her favorite writers. Nevertheless, the photo offers an important glimpse into her career: among other things, Cannady became known for her extensive library of “volumes of literature by and about the Negro,” black newspapers, and collections of journals, which she made available to anyone who wanted to learn more about Negro history, culture, and art.2 That photograph captivated me; I wanted to know more about Cannady and the Advocate, which came out nearly every Saturday for thirty-three years. I found brief information about her or the newspaper in a few publications, but no one had explored her noteworthy career in a documented biography.3 Marilyn Richardson, who edited a collection of essays and speeches by the nineteenth-century political writer Maria W. Stewart, observed that “readers searching for information on black women of outstanding prominence in their eras will quickly discover the gaping spaces of lost or thinly documented years in their recorded lives.”4 Many women, Cannady among them, left few personal documents like journals or diaries that might offer insight into their struggles and achievements. Brooke Kroeger calls this “poor planning for posterity.”5 While researching the white journalist Nellie Bly, she realized that “guaranteeing [oneself] a place in history … takes more than living a phenomenal life. In most cases, it takes careful attention to creating a documented record of that life that isn’t too hard to retrieve.”6 Women, whatever their race, often are marginalized in other ways, too. One source calls Cannady “fiery,” a description seldom applied to men.7 A striking photo published in the New York Amsterdam News was misidentified as “Atty. E. D. Cannady”—her husband’s initials.8 And throughout most of her career, she was known simply as Mrs. E. D. Cannady, in keeping with the conventions of the era. The scarcity of primary documents does not mean women’s lives cannot be studied; rather, scholars need to be more creative with their research, following hunches, cross-referencing leads, and reviewing endless reels of microfilmed text. So I slipped a reel of film onto the spindle of the massive machine, brought the Advocate into focus, and encountered the first of many dead ends: copies from September 1903 until May 1923, and from 1934 to 1936, were missing, a result of a library cataloging error and a lost opportunity to preserve holdings belonging to Cannady’s son, Ivan.9 Despite an exhaustive search and e-mails to discussion lists, reference librarians across the country, longtime Portlanders, and Cannady’s greatniece , these issues of the Advocate appear to be lost to historians. Still, more than five hundred issues of the weekly newspaper remain, a remarkable number considering that periodicals like the Advocate were, by 3 introduction their very nature, ephemeral. They were read, shared, clipped, sometimes even used in lieu of insulation; in 2007, a few copies of the Advocate were found stuffed inside a wood elevator hidden behind a wall in Cannady’s Portland home.10 Taken as a whole, the Advocate brings to life a tumultuous period in the state and nation and “shows us a world beyond the narrow limitations of traditional history”—a history that has emphasized Oregon’s white male pioneers.11 Seemingly unimportant details buried in the paper’s seven dense columns reveal a striking amount about migration, employment patterns, social and religious life, entertainment, Jim Crow restrictions, and black-owned businesses. These topics have been the focus of articles and books about the black experience in the West from the 1500s through the 1800s; far less is known, however, about these issues in Portland during the first decades of the twentieth century. Scholars also have overlooked how terrifying events such as the arrival of the Ku Klux Klan in the spring of 1921, or repeated showings of The Birth of a Nation, the film that glorified the Klan’s formation, might have affected Negroes who were trying to live, work, and rear children in Oregon. This book offers new information about the black experience that helps to dispel the myth that black women and men played a minuscule role in the state’s history during the early twentieth century. First and foremost, though, the Advocate is the story...