Excerpt: "An investigation by The New York Times - drawing on decades-old files from the New York City Commission on Human Rights, internal Justice Department records, court documents and interviews with tenants, civil rights activists and prosecutors - uncovered a long history of racial bias at his family's properties, in New York and beyond."
Fred C. Trump with his son Donald visiting a tenant in one of their apartment buildings in Brooklyn in January 1973. (photo: Barton Silverman/NYT)
'No Vacancies' for Blacks: How Donald Trump Got His Start, and Was First Accused of Bias
28 August 16
he seemed like the model tenant. A 33-year-old nurse who was living at the Y.W.C.A. in Harlem, she had come to rent a one-bedroom at the still-unfinished Wilshire Apartments in the Jamaica Estates neighborhood of Queens. She filled out what the rental agent remembers as a �beautiful application.� She did not even want to look at the unit.
There was just one hitch: Maxine Brown was black.
Stanley Leibowitz, the rental agent, talked to his boss, Fred C. Trump.
�I asked him what to do and he says, �Take the application and put it in a drawer and leave it there,�� Mr. Leibowitz, now 88, recalled in an interview.
It was late 1963 � just months before President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the landmark Civil Rights Act � and the tall, mustachioed Fred Trump was approaching the apex of his building career. He was about to complete the jewel in the crown of his middle-class housing empire: seven 23-story towers, called Trump Village, spread across nearly 40 acres in Coney Island.
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