Southwest Seattle Historical Society (Out of Many, One display)

Open Housing Pledge Card, from the personal papers of Elliot Couden, founder, Southwest Seattle Historical Society

This pledge card, sticker, and pin set comes from the personal collection of the founder of the Southwest Seattle Historical Society, Elliott Couden. It was produced during the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s, when the Citizens Committee for Open Housing was campaigning to outlaw housing discrimination in Seattle. Couden, who was a real estate agent based in White Center, supported the Open Housing Ordinance that inspired this pledge card. In 1964, Seattle voted nearly two to one to keep racial housing discrimination legal. Although the referendum failed, a similar effort was pushed through by City Council four years later.

Couden remained active in many causes to advance equity and freedom for all Seattle citizens, including as a member of the Seattle Human Rights Commission. Couden, among others, founded the Southwest Seattle Historical Society in 1984 to collect and preserve the history of the Duwamish Peninsula in perpetuity.

How it represents the community’s American experience:

This item represents our community’s American experience by exemplifying the solidarity, risk-taking, and coordinated effort that characterizes advocacy in the United States. Couden’s outspokenness as a realtor offered a rebuke against the anti-open housing ad campaign paid for by the real estate industry and helped ease the economic anxieties fueling backlash. It also likely exposed his business to risk. However, initiatives like the pledge cards would have helped to show the popularity of the ordinance. In this way, Couden’s advocacy would have made it easier for other people to act.

This pledge card, sticker, and pin set also exemplifies the power of national identity as an organizing tool. In the lead up to the 1964 vote, some Open Housing meetings opened with a Black performer reciting “I am an American. My land offers freedom and opportunity as no country ever before has done… I speak for dignity of the individual.” Like this performer, the pledge card uses ideas like individual dignity to frame the open housing debate. It calls for acting “justly,” treating others “as I would myself be treated,” and for refusing to rent or sell on the basis of race. In other words, the pledge talks about open housing as a matter of treating people equally and talks about discrimination as an active choice. It proposes that extending American ideals to people of color would be only natural. At the same time, these pledge materials did not persuade a majority of Seattle voters. The pledge’s history shows that becoming a member of “the people” of the United States has never been a neutral, inevitable process.

On display online on the Southwest Seattle Historical Society website.