Trump’s real estate had bias complaints
NEW YORK — She seemed like the model tenant. A 33-year-old nurse who was living at the YWCA 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 Trump.
“I asked him what to do and he says, ‘Take the application and put it in a drawer and leave it there,’ ” Leibowitz, now 88, recalled in an interview.
It was late 1963. Fred was grooming his son Donald, 17, who 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,” Leibowitz recalled. “Any time he would come into the building, Donald would be by his side.” Protracted battle
Over the next decade, as Donald 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 Department of Justice 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 frontpage news, and for Donald, amounted to his debut in the public eye.
“Absolutely ridiculous,” he was quoted saying of the government’s allegations.
Looking back, 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 it 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 Department of Justice of defamation.
When it was over, 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 decadesold files from the New York City Commission on Human Rights, internal Department of Justice records, court documents and interviews with tenants, civil rights activists and prosecutors — uncovered a long history of racial bias at his family’s properties.
Then and now, Trump has steadfastly denied any awareness of any discrimination at Trump properties. While 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 Trump focused on as his career took off in Manhattan in the 1980s. Coming under scrutiny
By 1966, the Trump organization’s business practices were beginning to come under scrutiny from civil rights groups that had received complaints from prospective AfricanAmerican tenants.
People like Maxine Brown.
Leibowitz, the rental agent at the Wilshire, remembered Brown repeatedly inquiring about the apartment. “Finally, she realized what it was all about,” he said.
Brown’s first instinct was to let the matter go; she was happy enough at the YWCA.
But a friend, Mae Wiggins, who also had been denied an apartment at the Wilshire, encouraged Brown to file a complaint with the New York City Commission on Human Rights, as she was doing.
Leibowitz was called to testify at the commission’s hearing on Brown’s case. Asked to estimate how many blacks lived in Trump’s various properties, he remembered replying: “To the best of my knowledge, none.”
After the hearing, 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.