Mary Laurinda Jane Smith Beatty
Mary Laurinda Jane Smith Beatty was an African American abolitionist and suffrage advocate who joined Abigail Scott Duniway, Maria P. Hendee, and Mary Ann King Lambert in 1872 to cast ballots as American citizens and women in Portland, Oregon. She was one of the first Black women to publicly agitate for women suffrage west of the Mississippi. Life. Beatty was born Mary Laurinda Jane Smith in February 1834 near Louisville, Kentucky. Her parents, James Madison Smith and Catharine Ann Philips Smith, were identified on their marriage certificate as “free persons of color.”  Mary Laurinda Jane  Smith married James William Beatty on January 8, 1850. The couple left Kentucky shortly thereafter, in the wake of newly-passed state-level restrictions on Blacks, as well as passage of the Fugitive Slave Act. They settled briefly in Hanover, Indiana, leaving Indiana too after the Indiana constitution restricted Black immigration. The couple moved steadily westward over the next decade, before settling in Portland, Oregon in 1864.    Despite the discrimination they faced in Portland, including the state’s Black Exclusion Laws of 1857 and the Poll Tax of 1862, Mary and James Beatty established successful livelihoods in Portland: Mary worked  as a dressmaker, while James worked as a painter. Despite Oregon’s prohibition on Blacks owning property, the Beattys owned substantial real estate holdings.  Politics. Throughout their lives, the couple worked for equal rights. James Beatty directed the city’s “Grand Ratification Jubilee” for the Fifteenth Amendment and supported efforts to hire Black police officers. He was a member of the Colored Lincoln Republican Club. On November 5, 1872, Mary Beatty joined Abigail Scott Duniway, Maria P. Hendee and Mary Ann King Lambert in visiting Portland’s Morrison Precinct to cast ballots, As the suffrage publication "The New Northwest" observed , “Thus was woman suffrage vindicated in the persons of Mrs. A.J. Duniway, a colored and two white women.” A few months later, Mary Beatty “read an essay proving that the colored women are awake to their own interests” at the 1873 Oregon State Woman Suffrage Association. Mary Beatty did not live to see the partial victory for Oregon’s woman suffrage in 1912, after five failed attempts. And it would not be until passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965 that racially discriminatory policies preventing people of color from exercising their right to vote were ended, fulfilling some part  of the promise of full suffrage. Still, Mary Beatty was a forerunner of Black suffrage activists who agitated for the vote in the Portland area during the important mobilization in 1912, including Hattie Redmond and Lizzie Weeks.