Seattle City Council approves open housing ordinance on April 19, 1968.

  • By David Wilma
  • Posted 4/02/2001
  • HistoryLink.org Essay 1384
See Additional Media

On April 19, 1968, the Seattle City Council unanimously approves a strong open housing ordinance with an emergency clause to take immediate effect. Although the council is deeply divided on the issue of open housing, unrest in more than 100 U.S. cities following the assassination of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. (1929-1968) make the members act together to maintain racial peace.

Seattle voters resoundingly defeated an open housing ordinance in March 1964. After that, groups and individuals undertook to integrate Seattle neighborhoods voluntarily. One group, the Voluntary Listing Service, "directly negotiated fifty-two sales [of homes to minorities] with a dollar volume over $1,000,000" by 1965. Homeowners in Leschi invited African Americans to integrate their neighborhood.

In the summer of 1967, Governor Dan Evans (b. 1925) announced his support of open housing. Voluntary open housing groups organized in Seattle suburbs such as Kirkland and Federal Way. African Americans were relatively free to move out of the Central Area, to where they had been confined previously. This allowed affluent families to leave the neighborhood, with the result that property values dropped.


Sources:

Walt Crowley, Rites of Passage: A Memoir of the Sixties in Seattle (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995), 255; Quintard Taylor, The Forging of a Black Community: Seattle's Central District from 1870s through the Civil Rights Era (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1994), 205-208.


Licensing: This essay is licensed under a Creative Commons license that encourages reproduction with attribution. Credit should be given to both HistoryLink.org and to the author, and sources must be included with any reproduction. Click the icon for more info. Please note that this Creative Commons license applies to text only, and not to images. For more information regarding individual photos or images, please contact the source noted in the image credit.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License
Major Support for HistoryLink.org Provided By: The State of Washington | Patsy Bullitt Collins | Paul G. Allen Family Foundation | Museum Of History & Industry | 4Culture (King County Lodging Tax Revenue) | City of Seattle | City of Bellevue | City of Tacoma | King County | The Peach Foundation | Microsoft Corporation, Other Public and Private Sponsors and Visitors Like You