Margot Black
American activist
Margot Black (born 1978) is an American tenant rights organizer, activist, grass-roots lobbyist and former political candidate. She helped found and was co-chair of Portland Tenants United, Portland's metro-wide tenant union focused on tenants' rights to secure, safe, affordable and equitable housing, tenant-union organizing, eviction prevention, and providing emergency assistance for renters navigating housing law.
Black helped draft Portland’s Relocation Assistance ordinance passed in 2017, served on Portland’s Rental Services Commission, and advised on formulation of the Fair Access in Renting (FAIR) ordinance in 2019.
Black was one of 18 candidates in the May 2020 primary election of Portland City Council. She ran for the seat held until December 2019 by the late city commissioner Nick Fish and ultimately won by Dan Ryan.
Early life and academic career
Black was born in 1978 in Salt Lake City, Utah. She experienced early years of poverty with intermittent homelessness and foster care shaped by her mother’s severe mental illness, until her grandmother gained custody of Black and her younger sister. In 1997 Black graduated from high school, moved to Portland with her then partner, and gave birth to her first child.
In 1999 Black started classes at Portland State University as working single mother, and in 2001 won a scholarship to attend Lewis & Clark College, where she graduated with a B.A. in 2003. Admitted to graduate school at the University of Oregon, she earned an M.S. in Mathematics in 2005 and passed her Ph.D. qualifying exams.
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This entry incorporates text from “Margot Black” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.