#fred c. trump

[handeaux]

Back In The Day, You Might Have Thought Everyone In Cincinnati Loved Fred Trump

People in Cincinnati were raving about Fred C. Trump a full decade before he ever dipped a toe into Cincinnati’s real estate market. Mildred Miller, in her Cincinnati Enquirer “Talk About Women” column [2 March 1954], begged the New York developer to buy some Queen City rental property:

“Sa-ay, why can’t it happen here? We sure could use a few ace-high landlords like Fred Trump of New York! He not only rents to families with children but also provides many extras to make them happy! . . . Such as playgrounds, indoor recreation centers, summer camps and baby sitters!”

Ten years later, Mildred Miller got her wish when Fred Trump purchased the moribund Swifton Village apartments in Bond Hill. Originally constructed with Federal Housing Administration financing at a cost of $10 million in 1954, the complex was half empty in 1964. The FHA foreclosed on the property and put it up for auction when the original developer defaulted. Fred Trump was the only bidder, snatching the complex for $5.7 million. The Cincinnati Enquirer [6 January 1965] was delighted:

“Before ink was dry on the Swifton deed, Mr. Trump said he sent his maintenance crews into the village on a $500,000 reconditioning and redecorating program. A new community center was built; streets and sidewalks were repaved; paint was dabbed here and there; new refrigerators and new laundry machines were installed; window shutters were ordered. New tenants started coming in.”

Although several sections of the complex were reserved for adult tenants, Fred Trump did build playgrounds in the portions of Swifton Village in which children were allowed. He also maintained a private swim club and sun deck for the exclusive use of tenants.

Fred Trump apparently worked overtime to satisfy the folks who lived at Swifton Village. One employee recalled when the owner visited Cincinnati around Mother’s Day and bought 1,000 orchids to distribute to the resident mothers. Trump passed out thousands of pre-stamped, pre-addressed post cards to all his tenants encouraging them to send complaints and suggestions directly to him. Enquirer business editor Ralph Weiskittel enthused [2 October 1966] about the benefit:

“This is the ‘service’ aspect of our plan, Mr. Trump said. When a tenant calls for a service he wants it ‘then’ – not an excuse that workmen are busy and will get to it the first thing tomorrow morning.”

Of course, the New York developer spent a lot of money burnishing his own image. The entire time he owned Swifton Village, every newspaper advertisement specified that the official name of the complex was “Fred C. Trump’s New Swifton Village.” Trump ran advertisements touting his concern for the tenants’ welfare. One advertisement in the Cincinnati Post [25 August 1966] promised a lofty goal:

“Who’s this man Fred C. Trump anyhow? He’s head man of Swifton Village. He loves this place. He’s out here regularly overseeing all the improvements that will make our Swifton Village a veritable paradise of suburban living.”

Another advertisement in the Enquirer [27 August 1966] emphasized his personal touch:

“This man worries a lot. If you lived here, you might be getting a phone call from Mr. Trump. Sound strange? Well, that’s the way Mr. Trump works. Several times a week (in addition to his regular visits) he picks up the phone and makes a long distance call to a tenant in his Swifton Village Apartments. Just to check up and find out if they’re content. Are things being taken care of? Anything he can do to help make living in his apartments a bit more pleasant? He’s the kind of landlord who worries about you.”

As a couple of lawsuits revealed, Fred Trump reserved his worries for his white tenants. In 1969, according to testimony by Trump’s own lawyer, only two or three apartments out of 1,167 in the complex were occupied by Black families.

The Cincinnati lawsuit was filed on behalf of Haywood and Rennell Cash, a young couple living with relatives because they were unable to find an apartment. At Swifton Village, they were told there were no vacancies, but they suspected otherwise. They consulted with the Housing Opportunities Made Equal organization, who sent a white woman out to Swifton Village. She was immediately offered an apartment. When the H.O.M.E. shopper returned with the Cashes, the apartment manager threw all of them out of his office.

A New York case, filed in 1973, involved almost identical circumstances, including allegations that Fred Trump’s managers falsely claimed that no vacancies existed and required higher rents from Black applicants. The New York lawsuit itemized incidents of discrimination at more than 17 Trump properties in New York and Virginia.

As it turned out, Fred Trump had been accused of discriminatory rental practices for years. At one point, folksinger Woody Guthrie lived in one of Trump’s Brooklyn buildings and crafted a new verse for his song “I Ain’t Got No Home” as a protest against the policies that kept that complex exclusively white:

We all are crazy fools As long as race hate rules! No no no! Old Man Trump! Beach Haven ain’t my home!

Despite his advertisements professing love for Cincinnati and his tenants, Fred Trump dropped a few hints indicating he was on the fence about his investment here. He told the Enquirer [6 January 1965] that Cincinnati was “a real disappointment” because the market was “overbuilt.” He described Swifton Village as a “Mexican stand-off,” meaning he expected to do no better than break even on his investment and that the property would mostly function as a tax write-off.

In December 1972, Fred Trump sold Swifton Village to Prudent Real Estate Trust of New York for $6.75 million. He never again entered the Cincinnati real estate market. All of the original Swifton Village apartment buildings were demolished around twenty years ago to make room for a new housing development.

[dartumbles]

Review: All in the Family: The Trumps and How We Got This Way by Fred C. Trump

All in the Family: The Trumps and How We Got This Way by Fred C. Trump My rating: 4 of 5 stars Fred Trump narrated his book quite well, I must admit. I love biographies now. Since writing my own, I have seen what goes into them. You need to be sensitive to others who shared your history over the years. Fred tried to make as many allowances as he could for slights, perceived or real. He stayed…

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Julia Métraux at Mother Jones:

When his uncle Donald became president, Fred Trump III—whose son William, due to a rare genetic mutation, has seizures and an intellectual disability—saw an opportunity to advocate for disability rights.

In a Time excerpt of his forthcoming book All in the Family, Fred Trump revealed a disturbing conversation with the then-president following a White House meeting in which he discussed how expensive caring for people with complex disabilities can be. Donald Trump said of some disabled people, his nephew recounted, “The shape they’re in, all the expenses, maybe those kinds of people should just die.” [...] It wasn’t the only concerning conversation Trump’s nephew alleged that they had. When a Trump family medical fund for William’s medical and living expenses was running low, Fred said his uncle told him, “He doesn’t recognize you. Maybe you should just let him die and move down to Florida.”

Donald Trump has ZERO respect for people with disabilities.

According to Fred C. Trump III in the All In The Family: The Trumps and How We Got This Way book, he recounted an experience that Donald said that disabled people “should just die.”

This isn’t the first time the Donald mocked and disrespected people with disabilities, as the infamous mocking of Serge Kovaleski in 2015 revealed.

See Also:

The Guardian: Trump told nephew to let his disabled son die, then move to Florida, book says

Time Magazine: My Uncle Donald Trump Told Me Disabled Americans Like My Son ‘Should Just Die’

[posttexasstressdisorder]

Un-human monster.

[repubsagainsttrump]

Republican Against Trump Of the Day: Fred Trump III, Donald Trump's Nephew.

The comments come a week after Time released an excerpt from Fred's new memoir, in which he claims that Donald said disabled Americans "should just die" due to "expenses" and "the shape they're in." (Fred initiated the conversation about disabilities while discussing his son, William, who was born with a rare genetic mutation.)

Fred also claimed that his uncle used racist language — including the N-word — when speaking with family members, as per The Guardian.

[tomorrowusa]

Donald Trump's racism has been normalized by too many people. But this is not the sort of mindset America needs in a head of state.

Fred Trump III, Weird Donald's nephew, has a new book out which makes our already low opinion of Trump plummet even further.

⚠️ Caution: Article quotes racist language used by Trump. ⚠️

In a new book, Donald Trump’s nephew recalls the future US president, at the start of his New York real estate career, surveying damage to a beloved car and furiously using the N-word. The shocking scene appears in All in the Family: The Trumps and How We Got This Way by Fred C Trump III, which will be published in the US next Tuesday. The Guardian obtained a copy. “‘Niggers,’ I recall him saying disgustedly. ‘Look what the niggers did,’” Fred Trump writes, describing his uncle’s racist outburst. In the midst of a tumultuous election, in which Trump faces Kamala Harris, the first woman of color to be vice-president, the book may prove explosive. Allegations of racism have followed Trump through his life in business and politics. Rumours persist that tape exists of Trump using the N-word during his time on The Apprentice, the hit NBC TV show that propelled him towards politics, though none have emerged. Omarosa Manigault Newman, a Black contestant, has said she has heard such a tape. Trump denies it. Since winning the Republican nomination for president in 2016, through four years in the White House and in his third presidential campaign, Trump has repeatedly used racist language and has faced accusations of race-baiting. He has vehemently denied all such accusations. [ ... ]

Trump III describes in detail a stunning moment he says happened in the early 1970s at the house of his grandparents, Donald Trump’s parents, in Queens, New York. It was “just a normal afternoon for pre-teen me”, Trump III writes, but then his uncle arrived. “Donald was pissed,” Trump III writes. “Boy, was he pissed.” Trump says his uncle showed him his “cotillon white Cadillac Eldorado convertible”. In its retractable canvas top, “there was a giant gash, at least two feet long [and] another, shorter gash next to it”. “‘Niggers,’ I recall him saying disgustedly. ‘Look at what the niggers did.’ “‘I knew that was a bad word.’” His uncle, Trump III writes, had not seen whoever damaged his car. Instead, he “saw the damage, then went straight to the place where people’s minds sometimes go when they face a fresh affront. Across the racial divide.”

Grandpa Fred Sr. also had racism issues.

In 1973, Fred Trump Sr, Donald Trump and the Trump company were sued by the US justice department, alleging racial discrimination at New York housing developments. Fred Trump III writes: “This was a painful period for the company and therefore for Donald … all the publicity was bad publicity. The ‘r’ word – racist – was thrown around.” The Trumps counter-sued and the case was settled “with no admission of guilt”, as Donald Trump has said. Trump III also addresses his grandfather’s apparent arrest at a Ku Klux Klan rally in 1927, which he says surprised the family when it was recently reported.

But wait, there's more!

Donald Trump thinks disabled people are a waste of flesh. In a separate article about Fred III's book, we hear how Uncle Donald told Fred III to let his disabled son die.

Donald Trump told his nephew he should let his disabled son die, then “move down to Florida”, the nephew writes in a new book, calling the comment “appalling”. “Wait!” Fred C Trump III writes. “What did he just say? That my son doesn’t recognise me? That I should just let him die? “Did he really just say that?” The shocking exchange is described in All in the Family: The Trumps and How We Got This Way, which will be published next week. The Guardian obtained a copy. [ ... ] On Wednesday morning, Time published an extract detailing Trump’s callous remark about his disabled great-nephew. It came days after family members at the Republican national convention portrayed Trump as a “very caring and loving” grandfather and family man. But Trump family history is complicated. [ ... ] In his own book, Fred Trump III describes a call to his uncle after the White House funeral of Robert Trump, the then president’s younger brother, in 2020. Fred Trump III says Donald Trump was then “the only one” of the older Trumps still “contributing consistently” to William’s care. He contacted his uncle even though he “really didn’t look forward to these calls” and “in many ways … felt I was asking for money I should have originally received from my grandfather” – Fred Trump Sr, the New York construction magnate whose will prompted the family feud. Fred Trump III says he called Donald Trump after seeing him at Briarcliff, a family golf club in Westchester county, New York. He says he described his son’s needs, increasing costs for his care, and “some blowback” from Trump’s siblings. “Donald took a second as if he was thinking about the whole situation,” Fred Trump III writes. “‘I don’t know,’” he finally said, letting out a sigh. ‘He doesn’t recognise you. Maybe you should just let him die and move down to Florida.’” Fred Trump III writes: “Wait! What did he just say? That my son doesn’t recognise me? That I should just let him die? Did he really just say that? That I should let my son die … so I could move down to Florida? Really?” Fred Trump III says he shouldn’t have been surprised, since he had recently heard his uncle say something similar in an Oval Office meeting with doctors and advocates for disabled rights.

[sarkos]

Fred C Trump III is the son of Fred Trump Jr, Donald Trump’s older brother who died aged 43 in 1981. A successful New York real estate executive in his own right, Fred Trump III is with his wife Lisa a campaigner for rights for disabled people like their son, William. In 2020, Fred Trump III’s sister, Mary Trump, published her own tell-all memoir, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man. Fred Trump III distanced himself from that book but it included the story of how Donald Trump and his siblings effectively disinherited Fred Trump III and Mary Trump, then cut off funding for William’s care. The case was settled in 2001. In his own book, Fred Trump III describes a call to his uncle after the White House funeral of Robert Trump, the then president’s younger brother, in 2020. Fred Trump III says Donald Trump was then “the only one” of the older Trumps still “contributing consistently” to William’s care. He contacted his uncle even though he “really didn’t look forward to these calls” and “in many ways … felt I was asking for money I should have originally received from my grandfather” – Fred Trump Sr, the New York construction magnate whose will prompted the family feud. Fred Trump III says he called Donald Trump after seeing him at Briarcliff, a family golf club in Westchester county, New York. He says he described his son’s needs, increasing costs for his care, and “some blowback” from Trump’s siblings. “Donald took a second as if he was thinking about the whole situation,” Fred Trump III writes. “‘I don’t know,’” he finally said, letting out a sigh. ‘He doesn’t recognise you. Maybe you should just let him die and move down to Florida.’”

Trump told nephew to let his disabled son die, then move to Florida, book says | Politics books | The Guardian

[allthegeopolitics]

https://www.thedailybeast.com/fred-c-trump-iii-says-donald-trump-repeatedly-used-n-word

[the-epic-hiram-lows]

who in Riverdale voted for Trump?

Ignoring age/living status here, because timeline is screwy so who the fuck knows.

Hiram Lodge: cannot vote because he is an ex-con. Had a lot of respect for Trump's legacy and image, but did not fuck with his anti-Mexican, LGBTQ+, and abortion stances. Also, as a C-Suite New Yorker, he knows that Trump's business deals often soured.

Archie: possibly unable to vote as well, but would proudly vote for Biden in a booth, wearing an 'I Voted!' sticker the entire day.

Betty: wrote in Bernie Sanders, will argue with anyone who calls it a wasted vote.

Jughead: same, except a more obscure radical leftist.

Veronica: bummed Hillary didn't run again, but voted for Biden via mail-in form.

Cheryl: hated her options, but voted Biden.

Kevin: same as Cheryl. but was proud to vote.

Reggie: didn't vote, will nod in agreement with anyone making a political stance at a party.

Alice: didn't vote, will argue with anyone making a political stance at a party. Posted a sticker on her social media, and did a photo op in front of the polling building. Shades of Blue MAGA but ultimately a toxic centrist.

Fred: was momentarily swayed by the idea of a real estate tycoon with real-world business experience, but made a hard pivot very quickly. Voted for Biden.

Sierra: mostly a centrist, but voted for Biden because she wanted to see Kamala as VP.

Hermione: same as Sierra.

Hal: cannot vote, would not vote even if he could- he would, however, gas Trump up whenever given half the chance.

FP: says the election is rigged years in advance. Isn't even sure what day voting is.

Penelope: Republican but not a Trump supporter. Doesn't vote.

Gladys: Trumpie. Says "I am a woman, and mother to a gay son" when people argue with her.

[reasoningdaily]

Aug. 27, 2016

She 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.

He was also grooming his heir. His son Donald, 17, would soon enroll at Fordham University in the Bronx, living at his parents’ home in Queens and spending much of his free time touring construction sites in his father’s Cadillac, driven by a black chauffeur.

“His father was his idol,” Mr. Leibowitz recalled. “Anytime he would come into the building, Donald would be by his side.”

Over the next decade, as Donald J. Trump assumed an increasingly prominent role in the business, the company’s practice of turning away potential black tenants was painstakingly documented by activists and organizations that viewed equal housing as the next frontier in the civil rights struggle.

The Justice Department undertook its own investigation and, in 1973, sued Trump Management for discriminating against blacks. Both Fred Trump, the company’s chairman, and Donald Trump, its president, were named as defendants. It was front-page news, and for Donald, amounted to his debut in the public eye.

Looking back, Mr. Trump’s response to the lawsuit can be seen as presaging his handling of subsequent challenges, in business and in politics. Rather than quietly trying to settle — as another New York developer had done a couple of years earlier — he turned the lawsuit into a protracted battle, complete with angry denials, character assassination, charges that the government was trying to force him to rent to “welfare recipients” and a $100 million countersuit accusing the Justice Department of defamation.

When it was over, Mr. Trump declared victory, emphasizing that the consent decree he ultimately signed did not include an admission of guilt.

But 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.

That history has taken on fresh relevance with Mr. Trump arguing that black voters should support him over Hillary Clinton, whom he has called a bigot.

While there is no evidence that Mr. Trump personally set the rental policies at his father’s properties, he was on hand while they were in place, working out of a cubicle in Trump Management’s Brooklyn offices as early as the summer of 1968.

Then and now, Mr. Trump has steadfastly denied any awareness of any discrimination at Trump properties. While Mr. Trump declined to be interviewed for this article, his general counsel, Alan Garten, said in a statement that there was “no merit to the allegations.” And there has been no suggestion of racial bias toward prospective residents in the luxury housing that Mr. Trump focused on as his career took off in Manhattan in the 1980s.

In the past, Mr. Trump has treated the case as a footnote in the narrative of his career. In his memoir “The Art of the Deal,” he dispensed with it in five paragraphs. And while stumping in Ohio, he even singled out his work at one of his father’s properties in Cincinnati, omitting that, at the time, the development was the subject of a separate discrimination lawsuit — one that included claims of racial slurs uttered by a manager whom Mr. Trump had personally praised.

As eager as he was to leave behind the working-class precincts of New York City where Fred Trump had made his fortune, Donald Trump often speaks admiringly of him, recalling what he learned at his father’s side when the Trump name was synonymous with utilitarian housing, not yet with luxury, celebrity, or a polarizing brand of politics.

“My legacy has its roots in my father’s legacy,” he said last year.

Coming Under Scrutiny

Fred Trump got into the housing business when he was in his early 20s, building a single-family home for a neighbor in Queens. During World War II, he constructed housing for shipyard workers and Navy personnel in Norfolk, Va. After the war, he returned to New York, setting his sights on bigger, more ambitious projects, realized with the help of federal government loans.

His establishment as one of the city’s biggest developers was hardly free of controversy: The Senate Banking Committee subpoenaed him in 1954 during an investigation into profiteering off federal housing loans. Under oath, he acknowledged that he had wildly overstated the costs of a development to obtain a larger mortgage from the government.

In 1966, as the investigative journalist Wayne Barrett detailed in “Trump: The Greatest Show on Earth,” a New York legislative committee accused Fred Trump of using state money earmarked for middle-income housing to build a shopping center instead. One lawmaker called Mr. Trump “greedy and grasping.”

By this point, the Trump organization’s business practices were beginning to come under scrutiny from civil rights groups that had received complaints from prospective African-American tenants.

People like Maxine Brown.

Mr. Leibowitz, the rental agent at the Wilshire, remembered Ms. Brown repeatedly inquiring about the apartment. “Finally, she realized what it was all about,” he said.

Ms. Brown’s first instinct was to let the matter go; she was happy enough at the Y.W.C.A. “I had a big room and two meals a day for five dollars a week,” she said in an interview.

But a friend, Mae Wiggins, who had also been denied an apartment at the Wilshire, told her that she ought to have her own place, with a private bathroom and a kitchen. She encouraged Ms. Brown to file a complaint with the New York City Commission on Human Rights, as she was doing.

“We knew there was prejudice in renting,” Ms. Wiggins recalled. “It was rampant in New York. It made me feel really bad, and I wanted to do something to right the wrong.”

Applying for Housing at a Trump Property in the '60s

In the 1960s, Mae Wiggins and her friend Maxine Brown applied for housing at the Wilshire Apartments in the Jamaica Estates neighborhood of Queens, N.Y. Ms. Wiggins recalled her experience.

It was 52 years ago. My friend and I applied for an apartment at the Wilshire in Queens New York. [00:12:20] and we were both told that there were no vacancies. [00:07:06] I realized that there were vacancies because they still had the ad still running. [00:21:51] And I was pretty sure it was because of the color of skin. [00:18:31] We were professional people with good credit rating; no reason to be denied apartments. 14.33 When we first filed a complaint, they sent out testers — a white couple, and they were told that they could that they had a vacancy. [00:21:35] I felt really really angry and hurt. And after that we were told that we could go into the vacant apartments, but I could not go because my mom was sick at that time. I thought it was was worth to fight for both of us. [00:20:59] I have an activist nature as you probably have picked up. Through the years I felt that the Trump Organization was biased, [00:23:41] And I will go to my grave with that thought.

Mr. Leibowitz was called to testify at the commission’s hearing on Ms. Brown’s case. Asked to estimate how many blacks lived in Mr. Trump’s various properties, he remembered replying: “To the best of my knowledge, none.”

After the hearing, Ms. Brown was offered an apartment in the Wilshire, and in the spring of 1964, she moved in. For 10 years, she said, she was the only African-American in the building.

Complaints about the Trump organization’s rental policies continued to mount: By 1967, state investigators found that out of some 3,700 apartments in Trump Village, seven were occupied by African-American families.

Like Ms. Brown, the few minorities who did live in Trump-owned buildings often had to force their way in.

A black woman named Agnes Bunn recalled hearing in early 1970 about a vacant Trump apartment in another part of Queens, from a white friend who lived in the building. But when she went by, she was told there were no vacancies.

“The super came out and stood there until I left the property,” Ms. Bunn said.

Ms. Bunn testified about the experience at a meeting with the New York City Commission on Human Rights in 1970. According to a summary, recovered from the New York City Municipal Archives, she told a Trump lawyer that it was known that no “colored” people were wanted as tenants in the building.

The lawyer concluded that the episode was “all a misunderstanding.” Ms. Bunn and her husband, a Manhattan accountant, soon became the building’s first black tenants.

Unlike the public schools, the housing market could not be desegregated simply by court order. Even after passage of the Fair Housing Act of 1968, which prohibited racial discrimination in housing, developments in white neighborhoods continued to rebuff blacks.

For years, it fell largely to local civil rights groups to highlight the problem by sending white “testers” into apartment complexes after blacks had been turned away.

“Everything was sort of whispers and innuendo and you wanted to try to bring it out into the open,” recalled Phyllis Kirschenbaum, who volunteered for Operation Open City, a housing rights advocacy organization. “I’d walk in with my freckles and red hair and Jewish name and get an apartment immediately.”

The complaints of discrimination were not limited to New York.

In 1969, a young black couple, Haywood and Rennell Cash, sued after being denied a home in Cincinnati at one of the first projects in which Donald Trump, fresh out of college, played an active role.

Mr. Cash was repeatedly rejected by the Trumps’ rental agent, according to court records and notes kept by Housing Opportunities Made Equal of Cincinnati, which sent in white testers posing as a young couple while Mr. Cash waited in the car.

After the agent, Irving Wolper, offered the testers an apartment, they brought in Mr. Cash. Mr. Wolper grew furious, shoving them out of the office and calling the young female tester, Maggie Durham, a “nigger-lover,” according to court records.

“To this day I have not forgotten the fury in his voice and in his face,” Ms. Durham recalled recently, adding that she also remembered him calling her a “traitor to the race.”

The Cashes were ultimately offered an apartment.

At a campaign stop in Ohio recently, Mr. Trump shared warm memories of his time in Cincinnati, calling it one of the early successes of his career. And in “The Art of the Deal,” he praised Mr. Wolper, without using his surname, calling him a “fabulous man” and “an amazing manager.”

“Irving was a classic,” Mr. Trump wrote.

The young Mr. Trump also spent time in Norfolk, helping manage the housing complexes his father built there in the 1940s. Similar complaints of discrimination surfaced at those properties beginning in the mid-1960s, and were documented by Ellis James, an equal housing activist.

“The managers on site were usually not very sophisticated,” Mr. James, now 78, recalled. “Some were dedicated segregationists, but most of them were more concerned with following the policies they were directed to keep.”

Battling the Government

Donald Trump said he had first heard about the lawsuit, which was filed in the fall of 1973, on his car radio.

The government had charged him, his father and their company, Trump Management Inc., with violating the Fair Housing Act.

Another major New York developer, the LeFrak Organization, had been hit with a similar suit a few years earlier. Its founder, Samuel LeFrak, had appeared at a news conference alongside the United States attorney, trumpeting a consent agreement to prohibit discrimination in his buildings by saying it would “make open housing in our cities a reality.” The LeFrak company even offered the equivalent of one month’s rent to help 50 black families move into predominantly white buildings.

Donald Trump took a different approach. He retained Senator Joseph McCarthy’s red-baiting counsel, Roy Cohn, to defend him. Mr. Trump soon called his own news conference — to announce his countersuit against the government.

The government’s lawyers took as their starting point the years of research conducted by civil rights groups at Trump properties.

“We did our own investigation and enlarged the case,” said Elyse Goldweber, who as a young assistant United States attorney worked on the lawsuit, U.S.A. v. Trump.

A former Trump superintendent named Thomas Miranda testified that multiple Trump Management employees had instructed him to attach a separate piece of paper with a big letter “C” on it — for “colored” — to any application filed by a black apartment-seeker.

The Trumps went on the offensive, filing a contempt-of-court charge against one of the prosecutors, accusing her of turning the investigation into a “Gestapo-like interrogation.” The Trumps derided the lawsuit as a pressure tactic to get them to sign a consent decree like the one agreed to by Mr. LeFrak.

The judge dismissed both the countersuit and the contempt-of-court charge. After nearly two years of legal wrangling, the Trumps gave up and signed a consent decree.

As is customary, it did not include an admission of guilt. But it did include pages of stipulations intended to ensure the desegregation of Trump properties.

Equal housing activists celebrated the agreement as more robust than the one signed by Mr. LeFrak. It required that Trump Management provide the New York Urban League with a weekly list of all its vacancies.

This did not stop Mr. Trump from declaring victory. “In the end the government couldn’t prove its case, and we ended up making a minor settlement without admitting any guilt,” he wrote in “The Art of the Deal.”

Only this was not quite the end.

A few years later, the government accused the Trumps of violating the consent decree. “We believe that an underlying pattern of discrimination continues to exist in the Trump Management organization,” a Justice Department lawyer wrote to Mr. Cohn in 1978.

Once again, the government marshaled numerous examples of blacks being denied Trump apartments. But this time, it also identified a pattern of racial steering.

While more black families were now renting in Trump-owned buildings, the government said, many had been confined to a small number of complexes. And tenants in some of these buildings had complained about the conditions, from falling plaster to rusty light fixtures to bloodstained floors.

The Trumps effectively wore the government down. The original consent decree expired before the Justice Department had accumulated enough evidence to press its new case.

The issue was becoming academic, anyway. New York’s white working-class population was shrinking. Shifting demographics would soon make it impractical to turn away black tenants.

By the spring of 1982, when the case was officially closed, Donald Trump’s prized project, Trump Tower, was just months from completion. The rebranding of the Trump name was well underway.

As for Ms. Brown, she still lives in the same apartment in the Wilshire.

Over the years, she has watched the building’s complexion begin to change — along with some of her neighbors’ attitudes toward her. During the 1990s, one man who used to step off the elevator whenever she stepped on suddenly started greeting her warmly.

On a recent afternoon, she reminisced about the unlikely role she played in breaking the color barrier of the Trump real estate empire.

“I just wanted a decent place to live,” she said.

[audiobooks24ru]

All in the Family: The Trumps and How We Got This Way by Fred C. Trump III Audiobook

[siddysthings]

Donald Trump's Great-Nephew William, 25, Is Nonverbal and Uses a Wheelchair. Here's What William's Dad Wants You to Know

[rebeleden]

Fred C. Trump III's New Book Includes Bombshells About Donald Trump

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CC KKKARMA IN ROEVEMBER