Collection is open for research.
Gift of Peter Boag, February 2021 (RL2021-008).
The Urban League of Portland was founded in 1945, with the goal of improving race relations and fighting racism and discrimination against Black residents of Portland, Oregon. Its work in the 1950s included advancing housing opportunities for Black people. The league sent out "testers" to gauge the level of discrimination in local real estate practices, and conducted surveys to prove that Black people moving into majority-white neighborhoods did not lower property values.
Source: "The Urban League of Portland: On the Road to Equality: A 50 Year Retrospective," by Darrell Millner (Portland, Oregon: Urban League of Portland, 1995).
Urban League of Portland flyer refuting housing myths, Coll 963, Oregon Historical Society Research Library.
Other collections at the Oregon Historical Society Research Library that include materials relating to the Urban League of Portland are: the Stella Maris House collection, Mss 1585; the Lee Owen Stone papers, Mss 2423; the Associations and institutions collection, Mss 1511; and the Politics collection, Mss 1513. The library also holds two oral histories, available online in OHS Digital Collections, that discuss the league: one with Susannah P. Malarkey, SR 9473,
The collection consists of a flyer sent by the Urban League of Portland, Oregon, titled "Don't Be Mis-Led!" The flyer disputes claims that a Black family moving into a majority-white or all-white neighborhood or Black people attending church in such a neighborhood will cause property values to decrease. The flyer states that the factors that cause property values to decrease are unrelated to race, religion, or nationality, and cites a 1952 survey in San Francisco, California, that found that the presence of Black residents in neighborhoods did not lower property values. The flyer also notes that the 1950 census showed that non-white families lived in 60 of Portland's 61 census tracts. There are notes, unrelated to the flyer's contents, written by the family the flyer was mailed to, the Milskis, on the title page.
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