Donald Trump has often said he made his money “the old-fashioned way,” and this is true, in that he prospered from racism.
A New York Times article published 01 June 1927, related Donald Trump’s father Fred Trump’s role in a Ku Klux Klan brawl that pitted 1,000 klansmen against 100 New York City Police in Queens. Though he wasn’t officially charged, Fred Trump was one of seven klansmen arrested during the incident. It probably wasn’t very shocking at the time as America’s racist practices were in full swing generations after Abe Lincoln freed the country’s African-American slaves. In fact, the mid-20’s saw a peak in KKK activity. Donald Trump would later deny his father’s involvement in the KKK brawl in spite of the fact that it happened two decades before he was born. Fred Trump’s enthusiasm for racist practices never changed until he was forced to do so by the law.
Presidential Candidate Donald Trump joined his father’s real estate company in New York in 1971, and only two years later, the company was served with a civil rights lawsuit that was filed against the Trump organization because it refused to rent to Black people. The Urban League got wind of the racist rental policy and actually sent both Black and White people in to apply for apartments that belonged to complexes owned by the Trumps. What they proved, was that Black people were denied rentals across the board, and only Whites were approved. A Village Voice article by Wayne Barrett, published in 1979, blew the lid off the Trump organization’s brewing pot of racist practices.
“Three doormen were told to discourage blacks who came seeking apartments when the manager was out, either by claiming no vacancies or hiking up the rents. A super said he was instructed to send black applicants to the central office but to accept white applications on site. Another rental agent said that Fred Trump had instructed him not to rent to blacks. Further, the agent said Trump wanted ‘to decrease the number of black tenants’ already in the development ‘by encouraging them to locate housing elsewhere.'”
The article explains that Trump’s reaction was to claim that the suit was a “nationwide drive to force owners of moderate and luxury apartments to rent to welfare recipients.”
“‘We are not going to be forced by anyone to put people…in our buildings to the detriment of tenants who have, for many years, lived in these buildings, raised families in them, and who plan to continue to live there. That would be reverse discrimination,’ he said. ‘The government is not going to experiment with our buildings to the detriment of ourselves and the thousands who live in them now.'”
Indeed, Trump’s wild, largely uninformed and unintelligent rants are the legacy of men who walked over the backs of other Americans to gain and secure their wealth. This may be symbolic to the American capitalist way, but it falls short of any form of greatness or real human success. As they say, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.
