Oregon Woman Suffrage History Month to Month

September 16, 1912: African American Suffragists Meet in Portland

“Colored Suffragists Meet Tonight,” Oregonian, September 16, 1912, 9.

African American suffragists of the Colored Women’s Equal Suffrage Association were a part of the coalition of suffrage organizations in Portland and the state that made the achievement of woman suffrage possible in Oregon in 1912.

The association was a part of the Colored Women’s Council of Portland formed in early 1912 with Mrs. Will Allen as president, Mrs. Bonnie Bogle as secretary and some 40 active members by the fall of 1912.

Membership was open to women who were members of Portland’s African American churches — First African Episcopal Methodist Zion Church, Bethel African Methodist Episcopal, Mount Olivet Baptist, and First African Baptist. When it was organized in May, 1912 Katherine Gray served as the first president, with Mrs. Lancaster the vice president and Edith Gray the treasurer. Hattie Redmond, the first secretary, became president that fall.

Members attended lectures by leaders of the African American community and also invited white suffragists to speak, including on this evening Esther Pohl Lovejoy.

Portland’s Colored Women’s Equal Suffrage Association was one of many African American women’s organizations whose members worked for woman suffrage in this period across the nation. Members of white women’s clubs had barred African American women from membership in Portland and elsewhere but Hattie Redmond and her colleagues achieved inclusion in the suffrage coalition of the 1912 Oregon campaign.

—Kimberly Jensen

“Colored Suffragists Meet Tonight,” Oregonian, September 16, 1912, 9.

Additional Reading:

City of Portland, Bureau of Planning, History of Portland’s African American Community (1805–to the Present) (Portland: Portland Bureau of Planning, 1993), 44, 18–21.

“Colored Suffragists Act,” Oregonian, September 17, 1912, 12.

Kimberly Jensen, “‘Neither Head nor Tail to the Campaign’: Esther Pohl Lovejoy and the Oregon Woman Suffrage Victory of 1912,” Oregon Historical Quarterly 108 no. 3 (Fall 2007): 350-383.

Elizabeth McLagan, A Peculiar Paradise: A History of Blacks in Oregon, 1788–1940
(Portland: Georgian Press, 1980), 120.

Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, 1850-1920 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998).

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Posted by history class on 09/06 at 07:15 PM
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