A Force for Change: Beatrice Morrow Cannady and the Struggle for Civil Rights in Oregon, 1912–1936 by Kimberley Mangun

Abstract

 OHQ vol. 111, no. 4 reluctant leader of the DSH within the Department of the Interior. He believed the program could only create demonstration projects for the benefit of local developers who would use the federal model to establish similar subsistence homesteads for the disadvantaged. Each project required local initiation and administration through a non-profit corporation with an advisory committee. The corporation would receive a federal loan to purchase land and build houses at a rate of 3 percent interest annually paid over thirty years. Approved homestead families could purchase small plots of land ranging from one to five acres for about $2,000. These homesteads would enable city workers to relocate to a semi-rural area and garden to help meet their food needs while they earned cash from a job and lived in a cohesive community with shared social values. Job opportunities and a favorable climate for agriculture along with political and citizen support determined community sites for the DSH. Resident and board-driven dissention sometimes disrupted community harmony while inadequate funding and tedious federal regulation further stymied development. Opponents considered the DSH socialism, while supporters believed the program benefited needy families. Despite its failure to create self-sustaining new communities in hard times, the work of the DSH remains a testament to an unprecedented experimental age of state planning, the physical or historical footprints of which remain in the form of houses, streets, and subdivisions, the visual culture of another age. Robert Carriker has written a sympathetic study of the Division of Subsistence Homesteads in the Far West. He contends that the DSH’s legacy is not failure but limited success despite insufficient funding,inadequate federal planning, and weak commitment by agency administrators. His research is thorough and the writing clear. Anyone interested in the history of the Far West during the twentieth century will find this study enlightening. By writing topically, he traces the history of each DSH community, and some repetition unavoidably occurs. Yet, this study is valuable because it provides greater detail about the social, economic, and institutional record of the New Deal in the Far West. R. Douglas Hurt Purdue University A Force for Change: Beatrice Morrow Cannady and the Struggle for Civil Rights in Oregon, 1912–1936 by Kimberley Mangun Oregon State University Press, Corvallis, 2010. Photographs, notes, bibliography, index. 352 pages. $24.95 paper. The recently released A Force for Change is the first book-length scholarly treatment of Beatrice Morrow Cannady, an early twentieth-century civil rights activist. The author emphasizes how Cannady used The Advocate, a weekly black newspaper published in Portland, Oregon, to promote positive race relations. Cannady was participating in a national wave of black activism that supported a federal anti-lynching bill, protested the showing of D.W. Griffith’s racist film, Birth of a Nation, demanded the integration of African Americans into the larger community , and battled the growing menace of Ku Klux Klan activity. The organization and focus of the book, however, is that of a social biography rather than a historical monograph. Discrimination is obvious, but what was the history of Oregon that erected racial barriers outWest?Why was Birth of a Nation so popular in Oregon and how did the Klan gain such a strong foothold in this state? Still, A Force for Change is a welcome additiontoagrowingbodyof scholarshipthathighlights the leadership skills of AfricanAmericans  Reviews and the activism of black communities in western regions of the United States.The emphasis in African-American history has tended to mimic the East to West Anglo-American experience — disregarding the fact that the earliest African presence in North America migrated there from Spanish territories. Mangun’s research and insight into Cannady’s life work offers examples of some of the peculiar habits and discrimination toward non-white populations in “free states” of the West Coast. She detailsCannady’snumerouslecturestoschools, congregations, women’s groups — anywhere she might gain a platform to speak on issues of race, gender, and the accomplishments of the underrepresented.The author,however,limits her historical interpretation and explanation of the special circumstances that governed the lives of African Americans in Portland and the state of Oregon. As early as 1844, white settlers...