Beatrice Morrow Cannady was a Black woman who worked as an editor and activist in Portland, Oregon, between 1912 and 1936.

Her story, viewed in conjunction with hundreds of issues of The Advocate, brings to life a tumultuous period in Oregon, when Blacks throughout the state were racially exiled because of Jim Crow segregation restrictions. They were further exiled by terrifying events such as the arrival of the Ku Klux Klan and repeated showings of the racist film The Birth of a Nation.

The Advocate kept the Black community informed about local and national issues and championed civil rights. As Cannady observed in 1931, “There are many reliable subscribers who do all they can to support us both morally and financially, for they realize what a terrible calamity it would be for the colored people not to have a mouthpiece in the community.”

This role was critical—especially in a city such as Portland, where White allies were scarce.

I found a beautiful image of a young Cannady on the Oregon Historical Society website in 2002. I had lived in Oregon for more than a decade by then, but I had never heard about her or the weekly Advocate. Intrigued, I printed the small photo and the few biographical sentences that accompanied it.

Cannady kept pulling me back into her orbit. I found brief mentions of her or The Advocate in a few publications such as these, but no one had explored her career in a documented biography. And so in 2004, I slipped a reel of microfilm onto the spindle of the massive machine in the library, brought The Advocate into focus, and began learning about Beatrice Morrow Cannady.

Beatrice Morrow was born at home in Littig, Texas, on January 9, 1889. The township had been established six years earlier on a parcel donated by her grandfather, Jackson Morrow, a former slave. The Morrow clan, including Jackson and his wife, Lucy, owned homes there, tilled the soil, reared children, and buried loved ones.