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

by Kimberley Mangun

A Force for Change is the first full-length study of the life and work of one of Oregon's most dynamic civil rights activists, journalist Beatrice Morrow Cannady. Between 1912 and 1936, Cannady tirelessly promoted interracial goodwill and fought segregation and discrimination. She gave hundreds of lectures to high school and college students and shared her message with radio listeners across the Pacific Northwest. She was assistant editor, and later publisher, of The Advocate, Oregon's largest black newspaper. Cannady was the first black woman to graduate from law school in Oregon, and the first to run for state representative. She held interracial teas in her home in Northeast Portland and protested repeated showings of the racist film The Birth of a Nation. And when the Ku Klux Klan swept into Oregon, she urged the governor to act quickly to protect black Oregonians' right to live and work without fear. Despite these accomplishments--and many more during her twenty-five-year career--Beatrice Cannady fell into obscurity when she left Oregon in about 1938. A Force for Change illuminates Cannady's important role in advocating for better race relations in Oregon in the early decades of the twentieth century. It describes her encounters with the period's leading black artists, editors, politicians, and intellectuals, including W. E. B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, A. Philip Randolph, Oscar De Priest, Roland Hayes, and James Weldon Johnson. It dispels the myth that blacks played a negligible role in Oregon's history and it enriches our understanding of the black experience in Oregon. A Force for Change is an invaluable resource for students and scholars of women's history, gender studies, African American history, journalism history, and Pacific Northwest history. This timely volume is a vital resource for any reader interested in a richer understanding of Oregon history.

352 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2010

Reviews

[Carrie · Rating 2 out of 5]

I found Beatrice Cannady to be incredibly inspiring and am in awe of her perseverance. However, she is deserving of a better biography. The first few chapters read more like a time-line turned into paragraphs than an actual book - there is no narrative and the author fails to bring her to life. That said, in the later chapters this is improved upon. I'm not sure if the issues with the first chapters are due to a lack of historical reference material or the author's tendency toward including EVERY detail found, but reading this made me wish that another author would take up her life as the subject of another book.

[Debbie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good researched book on a local Portland woman who ran the Advocate Newspaper and challenged both whites and African Americans to work together.
Beatrice would invite cultural and political leaders into her home in NE Portland to socialize so they would get to know each other better.
Beatrice was a driving force in Portland, OR and had affliations with the NAACP chapters across the United States.
I wich I could have met her and I wish I had been taught about her in history class.
We have so many good citizens that have worked hard to make this country better.
Oregon Public Broadcasting did present a documentary on Beatrice's life.