1/
In 1927, Fred Trump started Elizabeth Trump & Son Co., the real estate company that would later become The Trump Organization

Fred Trump began his career constructing low-income apartments and row houses in Brooklyn and Queens, New York
2/
🔸September 1927, Fred Trump was arrested during a Ku Klux Klan rally in New York (NYT)

Tidbit
-One of Fred Trump’s former tenants was none other than folk music legend Woody Guthrie
3/
🔸Woody Guthrie wrote a song that referred to Fred Trump as, “Old Man Trump” and added that Trump “drew a color line” by forcing minorities into segregated housing

👇
4/
“Old Man Trump” lyrics

I suppose
Old Man Trump knows
Just how much
Racial Hate
He stirred up
In the bloodpot of human hearts
When he drawed
That color line
5/
Backstory—

🔸In 1950, Woody Guthrie moved into an apartment at Beach Haven, a cluster of sixteen residential buildings in Gravesend, Brooklyn, just a few minutes from the creaky boardwalk and frankfurter stands at Coney Island Beach
6/
🔸The complex Guthrie lives in was owned and operated by Fred Trump

-For the years Guthrie lived and wrote there, Trump was his landlord

-Guthrie didn’t much like the place—he took to calling it “Bitch Havens” in his correspondence—
7/
🔸In 1954, while living in Fred Trump’s apartments at Coney Island—Woody Guthrie wrote a delightfully scornful song about Trump’s discriminatory rental policies

👇
8/
Don’t let this next part get past you

🔸Several handwritten drafts of the lyrics—sometimes titled “Beach Haven Race Hate,” “Beach Haven Ain’t My Home,” and “Old Man Trump”—are presently on display at the Woody Guthrie Center, in Tulsa, Oklahoma

That’s right👇
Ironically and coincidentally
The Woody Guthrie Center where the lyrics of racist Fred Trump are on display and Trump’s Covid Comback rally are both in Tulsa, Oklahoma
10/

🔸In 44 radio broadcast, Woody Guthrie launched
“All You Fascists,”—a ninety-second song about bending the arc of history:

“I’m gonna tell you fascists
You may be surprised
The people in this world
Are getting organized
You’re bound to lose
You fascists bound to lose”
11/
Tidbit
🔸2016, Beach Haven, was fined for dumping two hundred thousand gallons of untreated sewage into Coney Island Creek each day

The largest fine that NY DepT of Environmental Conservation has ever levied against an apartment building for the mishandling of human waste
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