A Look Back: When The Trump Real Estate Business Was Accused of Racial Discrimination

In 1973, Trump Management, Fred Trump and his son, Donald, were sued by the Dept. of Justice. The case was settled two years later.

The stories they told were depressingly similar and, even today, half a century later, disturbing.

NYC apartment buildings, photo credit: deberarr, I-Stock Photos

In 1973, Annette Gandy Fortt, a New York City school teacher, went to look at apartments in Queens. She had seen a newspaper ad placed by the management company that said there were vacancies. When she got there, the building's superintendent -- super, in New York-ese -- told her, no, they had nothing available.

 

Around the same time, Agnes Bunn went to see housing in another building, a property of the same owner. 

"The super came out and stood there until I left the property," Brown recalled to the New York Times in 2016.

Some years earlier - in the Sixties -- Maxine Brown applied for an apartment at another building in Queens -- owned by the same company. She was turned down. So was her friend, Mae Wiggins.

The applicants who were rejected had one thing in common. They were Black. The company that owned the rental properties was Trump Management. The company's chair was Fred C. Trump and, by the late 1960s, its president was Fred's younger son, Donald.

In 1968, a federal law was passed prohibiting racial discrimination in housing. In reality, it was routinely flouted throughout the country.

"Even after passage of the Fair Housing Act of 1968 ... white neighborhoods continued to rebuff blacks," according to The New York Times. 

The Black applicants suspected that was the case with the Trump properties.

"I was Black," Fortt told NBC News in 2016. "I was not wanted."

Annette Gandy Fortt, 2022 Photo credit: Ms. Fortt’s Facebook page

Maxine Brown said, "I was turned away because of my color."

"We knew there was prejudice in renting," Wiggins said, "It was rampant in New York. It made me feel really bad."

But suspicion by itself is not evidence. So, Fortt complained to the New York City Human Rights Commission. The commission sent a white person -- a so-called tester -- to apply at the same building. The tester was offered the apartment, according to NBC News, citing court papers.

Brown also filed a complaint with the Commission. Her application had been taken by a rental agent named Stanley Leibowitz.

"Mr. (Fred) Trump and his son Donald came into the office," Leibowitz would recount many years later. "I asked what I should do with this application because she's calling constantly and his response to me was, 'You know I don't rent to the N-word. Put it in a drawer and forget about it.'" 

After they filed complaints with the commission, Fortt, Brown and Bunn were all offered and rented apartments in Trump buildings.

Complaints from Black applicants about being refused apartments continued. Private organizations sent in waves of white testers to see if they got the apartments.

"In the July 1972 test at (Trump-owned) Shorehaven Apartments in Brooklyn, the same superintendent who had rejected a Black woman told the white woman who came later that she could 'immediately rent either one of two available apartments,' according to testimony," the Washington Post reported in 2016.

"The tests played out across Queens and Brooklyn and revealed a pattern, the housing activists said in court filings. White testers were encouraged to rent at certain Trump buildings, while the black testers were discouraged, denied or steered to apartment complexes that had more racial minorities, according to testimony," the Post reported.

Phyllis Kirschenbaum, a volunteer with Operation Open City, said, "Everything was sort of whispers and innuendo and you wanted to try to bring it out into the open. I'd walk in with my freckles and red hair and Jewish name and get an apartment immediately."

In October 1973, the U.S. Justice Department filed a lawsuit accusing the Trump firm, Fred Trump and Donald Trump of violating the Fair Housing Act of 1968.

Among the allegations in the government's complaint were "refusing to rent dwellings and negotiate for the rental of dwellings with persons because of race and color" and "representing to persons because of race and color that dwellings are not available for inspection and rental when such dwellings are in fact so available."

Prosecutors alleged that the management company even flagged applications by African-Americans with the letter "C," for Colored.

Among a trove of court documents the FBI released in 2017 under the Freedom of Information Act was a handwritten statement by a doorman at a Trump property in Brooklyn who said the buildings super told him, "If a Black person came to (the building) and inquired about an apartment for rent ... that I should tell him that the rent was twice as much as it really was, in order that he could not afford the apartment."

A person who worked briefly as a rental supervisor (the name is redacted) said he or she once asked Fred Trump what his policy was for minorities. 

"He said it was absolutely against the law to discriminate," the former employee said in a statement. "At a later time ... Fred Trump told me not to rent to blacks."

Photo credit: Liang Jinjian

3,700-unit Trump Village, Brooklyn. In 1967, there were 7 Black families*

In his affidavit responding to the 1973 lawsuit, Donald Trump said he was shocked by the allegations. 

"I have never, nor has anyone in my organization ever, to the best of my knowledge, discriminated or shown bias in the renting of our apartments," Trump stated.

To represent them, the Trumps hired the powerful, combative lawyer, Roy Cohn, who had first gained fame working for Sen. Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s. In December 1973, the Trumps countersued the government for $100 million. The judge tossed the claim out.  

Elyse Goldweber, then a young federal prosecutor, deposed Donald Trump. She said during breaks, she and Trump sometimes spoke off the record.

She told PBS years later that Trump would say things to her such as, "You know, 'You wouldn't want to live with those people either... I took what he meant to mean you wouldn't want African-American neighbors." 

The case dragged on for two years. In 1975, the government and the Trumps finally settled it with the defendants agreeing to a consent decree that required them to advertise in local papers that their properties were open to people of all races.

“Our organization has never discriminated and does not now discriminate,” Trump said in an 1973 affidavit (photo credit: Gage Skidmore)

In his 1987 book, The Art of the Deal, Trump would write, "In the end the government couldn't prove its case and we ended up making a minor settlement without admitting any guilt."

Is all of this ancient history? A relic of a bygone era? Maybe not.

Two weeks ago, a federal judge in New York City ruled that a lawsuit against 77 New York City real estate brokerages charged with discriminating against prospective tenants having Section 8 vouchers - federal government rental subsidies for low-income people - could proceed.

As with the case against Trump Management, the plaintiff, the non-profit Housing Rights Initiative, employed testers to confirm their allegations. When testers revealed that they wished to use vouchers, they were frequently and illegally told they were not accepted, according to the lawsuit.

"Defendants in this action are landlords and brokers who blatantly refuse to rent apartments to New Yorkers with vouchers," the suit said. 

Because 47 percent of New York City voucher holders are Hispanic and about 35% are Black, and 28% are disabled, HRI argued that the brokers and landlords named in the suit effectively violated the Fair Housing Act -- the same law under which the Trumps were sued 50 years ago -- by discriminating on the basis of race and disability.

According to The Gothamist newspaper, U.S. District Court Judge Sidney Stein ruled that HRI "adequately pleads that such a policy has, does and will continue to have a disparate impact on Black and Hispanic individuals, who are protected under the FHA."

The case now proceeds to discovery, when the defendants must hand over documents related to their practices. There were originally 88 defendants when the lawsuit was filed last spring. Nearly half of them have since settled, several just since Judge Stein ruled that the lawsuit can go forward.

*According to the NY Times in a 2016 article