Trump’s bigotry hurts people
His past history of discrimination is just one reason he cannot be president
I want to introduce you to Agnes, Mae, Alfred, and Annette. I’ve spent so much time over the past few months learning their stories by poring over boxes and boxes of legal documents outlining their experiences with Donald Trump and his family.
By now, you might have read the New York Times’ damning exposé of the Trump family’s long history of housing discrimination. Now I’m asking you to make sure that everyone you know reads these stories, because no one who treats his fellow Americans this way can ever be our president.
In the 1960s, African Americans in New York and Virginia inquiring about vacant apartments in Trump buildings were repeatedly turned away. After investigations by the New York City Commission on Human Rights and the U.S. Department of Justice, the Trumps’ discrimination made its way into federal courts — USA v. Trump was filed in 1973.
It wasn’t the first time that Trump and his family had been sued for discriminating against African-American renters. Just four years earlier, an African-American couple in Ohio had sued the Trumps for refusing to rent them a unit at their apartment complex in Cincinnati. While that case flew under the radar, the 1973 case would be different. This time, the Trumps were being sued by the U.S. government in what remains one of the largest housing discrimination cases in U.S. history.
Part of my job as a researcher is to go through all of the old court documents in the various lawsuits against a candidate, and Trump has certainly kept me and my team busy. But looking at these documents and hearing these stories in particular moved me. Because when the Trumps’ company instructed its building managers to write “C” for “colored” on applications from African-American renters, that hurt people. They turned Americans looking for a home into nothing more than a letter.
When Alfred Hoyt, a Black man, was told that a Trump apartment was unavailable, Shelia Greenberg, a white woman, was sent to check and see if she was given different information when she inquired about the apartment. Where Hoyt was told that he was last on a long list and wasn’t allowed to leave an application, Greenberg was treated cordially, and ended up actually placing a deposit and signing a lease a few days later.
The exact same thing happened to Annette:
Patterns like this are so clear — an African-American renter walks into a management office, is treated with disrespect and turned away. A white renter walks into the management office after them and is treated professionally and offered an apartment. That’s housing discrimination, pure and simple. It happened at Trump buildings across the country — in New York, Ohio, and Virginia. And it hurt people.
Look at this complaint filed by Agnes Bunn. She had to check boxes stating that because of her race and because of her color, she was illegally denied housing by the Trumps, and then sign her name. I can’t know the anger and pain she must have felt filling this out, of the time she spent going over to the Human Rights Commission because Fred Trump and his son, Donald, were infringing on her most basic rights.
And listen to Mae tell her story — it’s so similar to Agnes’ and Alfred’s and Annette’s. It’s clear that the Trumps didn’t value Mae’s rights or dignity. Why would we let someone who so cavalierly discards people become our president?
Trump’s version of this story is that they settled the lawsuit with no admission of wrongdoing and that was the end of it. He recently said, “It was very easy to do” and called it, “just one of those things.” But that’s just not true. Just three years after the Justice Department reached a settlement with Trump that prohibited the company from discriminating, the government had to take him back to court for failing to comply with the agreement. Then, four years later, the Trumps were sued again for continuing the same pattern of discrimination against minority renters.
I know we don’t need to see someone’s handwriting, or watch their tears, to know that discrimination in any form is wrong and disqualifying for any presidential can. But there are only 6 days left in this election, and going over these pages again, seeing these people’s stories, and knowing that it happened again and again, has given me new motivation to keep pushing through the homestretch. These bold leaders — Agnes, Mae, Alfred, Annette, and others who stood up the Trumps — are inspiring. They didn’t acquiesce. They didn’t just walk away. They stood up for what was right, and we need to follow their lead.
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