Woody Guthrie and Fred Trump: A Tale of Tenancy and a Real Estate Empire's Racist Foundations

When Woody Guthrie moved into his new apartment in Brooklyn in 1950, he likely didn’t foresee the clash of ideals he would experience with his landlord, Fred Trump. By this time, Guthrie had already traveled a long road, evolving from the casual racism of his Oklahoma youth to becoming a vocal advocate against racial injustice. His landlord, Fred Trump, on the other hand, had built his real estate empire on a foundation that included racially discriminatory practices, which starkly contrasted with Guthrie’s evolving beliefs.

Guthrie’s Journey Against Racism

Guthrie’s transformation into a civil rights advocate was influenced by his experiences and observations across the United States. He had learned that racism was not confined to the South but was also deeply embedded in the North. This awareness was reflected in his music. He wrote songs like “The Ferguson Brothers Killing,” which condemned the police killing of unarmed African Americans Charles and Alfonso Ferguson in Freeport, Long Island, in 1946. They were denied service at a bus terminal cafe, which led to a tragic confrontation.

In another song, “Buoy Bells from Trenton,” Guthrie denounced the gross miscarriage of justice in the case of the “Trenton Six,” where six black men were wrongfully convicted of murder in 1948 by an all-white jury, a trial tainted with perjury and manufactured evidence.

By 1949, Guthrie stood alongside notable figures like Paul Robeson, Howard Fast, and Pete Seeger, protesting against racist violence in Peekskill, New York. The riots there inspired him to write 21 songs, including “My Thirty Thousand,” which was later recorded by Billy Bragg and Wilco. These experiences solidified Guthrie’s commitment to fighting racial injustice.

Fred Trump’s Racist Business Practices

In the postwar era, affordable housing in New York was a critical issue, with many returning servicemen in need of homes. The Federal Housing Authority (FHA) began issuing loans and subsidies to developers for urban apartment blocks. Fred Trump seized this opportunity, profiting massively from these public housing projects. He was not just a builder but also collected rents from these developments, including the massive Beach Haven complex where Guthrie lived.

However, Trump’s success was marred by unethical practices. In 1954, a U.S. Senate committee investigated him for profiteering off public contracts, notably overestimating his Beach Haven building charges by $3.7 million. More insidious was his adherence to the FHA’s guidelines, which promoted “inharmonious uses of housing” – a euphemism for racial segregation. Trump enthusiastically embraced these guidelines, ensuring that his projects, including Beach Haven, were predominantly white, using restrictive covenants to exclude black tenants.

A Postwar Housing Haven – For Whites Only

When Guthrie signed his lease at Beach Haven, he was likely unaware of its discriminatory foundations. The FHA’s policies under the New Deal were intended to support the construction of affordable housing, yet developers like Trump exploited these policies to entrench racial segregation further. This was a betrayal of the New Deal’s inclusive vision.

Guthrie’s realisation of the discriminatory practices at Beach Haven was a rude awakening. The complex was a symbol of postwar prosperity and a solution to the housing crisis, but only for whites. This clash of ideals between Guthrie, an emerging civil rights advocate, and Trump, a developer benefiting from institutional racism, highlighted the pervasive nature of racial discrimination in America, even in the supposed land of equality.

Only a year into his Beach Haven residency, Guthrie – himself a veteran – was already lamenting the bigotry that pervaded his new, lily-white neighbourhood, which he’d taken to calling “Bitch Havens.”

In his notebooks, he conjured up a scenario of smashing the colour line to transform the Trump complex into a diverse cornucopia, with “a face of every bright colour laffing and joshing in these old darkly weeperish empty shadowed windows.” He imagined himself calling out in Whitman-esque free verse to the “negro girl yonder that walks along against this headwind / holding onto her purse and her fur coat”:

For Guthrie, Fred Trump came to personify all the viciousness of the racist codes that continued to put decent housing – both public and private – out of reach for so many of his fellow citizens:

And as if to leave no doubt over Trump’s personal culpability in perpetuating black Americans’ status as internal refugees – strangers in their own strange land – Guthrie reworked his signature Dust Bowl ballad “I Ain’t Got No Home” into a blistering broadside against his landlord:

In 1979, 12 years after Guthrie had passed away due to Huntington’s Disease, Village Voice reporter Wayne Barrett published a two-part exposé about Fred and Donald Trump’s real estate empire.

Barrett focused extensively on the lawsuits filed against the Trumps in 1973 and 1978 by the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Justice Department.A major charge was that “racially discriminatory conduct by Trump agents” had “created a substantial impediment to the full enjoyment of equal opportunity.” The most damning evidence had come from Trump’s own employees. As Barrett summarises:

According to court records, four superintendents or rental agents confirmed that applications sent to the central [Trump] office for acceptance or rejection were coded by race. 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.”

Guthrie had written that white supremacists like the Trumps were “way ahead of God” because:

Although the lyrics were written in 1954, sadly Guthrie never actually recorded 'Old Man Trump.

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