Margaret H. Collins Papers

Margaret Hill Collins, a member of the Society of Friends, was an advocate for integrated housing in the Philadelphia suburbs.

In the early 1950s, Ms. Collins and her friend, Mazie B, Hall, helped organize Quaker-sponsored "fellowship weekends;" African American families from the city were invited to spend time with white families in the suburbs.

She subsequently earned her real estate broker's license and in 1956 founded Friends Suburban Housing, later Suburban Fair Housing Inc. The company faced harassment when it sold houses to African Americans in all-white areas, and in 1963, a three-day riot raged when a black family moved to a house in Folcroft sold to it by Ms. Collins. Over 20 years, Ms. Collins sold 232 homes to minorities in 57 once-white communities. In the 1960s, she sued the Main Line Board of Realtors after it denied her membership, and she won the case on appeal in 1973. She gave up her agency in 1975 after fair-housing laws were passed.

She spent the next 25 years renovating more than a dozen Delaware County houses to rent to low-income families. She served on the Board of the Community Support Corporation, a small non-profit.

Ms. Collins was a life-long resident of Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. Her father was a paper-products manufacturer. She earned an associate degree from Sarah Lawrence College, a bachelor's degree from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1939, and a master's in social work from Bryn Mawr College in 1940. She was a Tenant-Relations Assistant for the Philadelphia Housing Authority from 1940-1941.