Music

Woody Guthrie wrote songs about his racist landlord... Donald Trump's dad

by Richard Howard

While watching the absolute carnival of idiocy that is Donald Trump’s campaign, one might ask: “Where the hell did this asshole get his bigoted, xenophobic, and generally batshit crazy views?” Well, turns out to answer that question you’d need look no further than his dad, the late real estate mogul Fred Trump. But don’t take it from us. The elder Trump’s pigheaded ways were recorded for posterity by none other than folk music legend Woody Guthrie – who just happened to be his tenant.

This isn’t as random as you’d think. Fred Trump owned a ton of ‘affordable rental housing’ in New York in the ’50s and ’60s. Guthrie, by no means a baller, took up a two-year residency in one of Trump’s Brooklyn buildings in 1950. Chances are, though, if Guthrie was black that would have never happened.

A blatant racist, Fred Trump and his Trump Management Co. were shown to not only deny nearly all black housing applicants, they actually encouraged existing black tenants to leave. A 1973 civil rights lawsuit claimed that The Urban League sent testers to apply for apartments in Trump-owned complexes and the results were, if you’ll pardon the expression, pretty black and white: the white people got the apartments and the black people didn’t.

Whether Guthrie was aware of Trump’s racist leanings before becoming his tenant. Fun sidebar: though never proven to be the same man, a Fred Trump was arrested during a New York Ku Klux Klan riot in 1927. Yet seeing it first-hand rankled the singer sufficiently that he had cause to pen the following verse in one of several songs recently re-discovered in the Woody Guthrie Archives.

Fast-forward to today, and the hellspawn of Fred’s loins is now stumping for the position of leader of the free world. Well, I guess we can say one thing for sure: from promising to ban Muslims’ entry into the US to making spectacularly racist comments about Mexicans and Latinos, Donald would be making his daddy proud.

[h/t The Conversation]