Print

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)
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

By Jonathan Mahler and Steve Eder, The New York Times

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.

READ MORE


e-max.it: your social media marketing partner
Email This Page