Government Accused Donald Trump Of Racial Discrimination In 1973, Tweets Add To History Of Racism Charges
Donald Trump posted a series of tweets on Sunday morning that were widely condemned as “racist,” as The Inquisitr reported. Trump claimed that four first-year members of Congress were not born in the United States and should “go back” to the countries “from which they came.” One veteran investigative reporter, who is now a Fox News correspondent, expressed surprise at his “friend” Trump.
“Sad to watch my friend @realDonaldTrump take [the] low road,” wrote Geraldo Rivera on Twitter. “Let’s stick to issues & steer clear of language that’s xenophobic even racist. @POTUS you’re better than that.”
But other Twitter users replied with their opinion that Trump is not “better than that.” In fact, as some noted, accusations of racism against Trump go back more than four decades.
In 1973, Trump, who then was first making his name in the New York real estate business in partnership with his father, the longtime New York real estate magnate Fred Trump, was formally accused of racial discrimination by the federal government, in the housing developments that Trump and his father owned.
In fact, The New York Times reported during the 2016 presidential campaign that Trump property managers were allegedly instructed to mark minority rental applicants with a “C” — for “colored” — on their applications.
Even as the African-American population of New York City was exploding in the 1970s, Trump’s buildings contained 75 percent fewer minority renters than comparable buildings in the same areas, according to a HuffPost report on the 1970s-era racial discrimination cases against Trump.
Of 9,050 Trump-owned apartments in 35 buildings, only 399 were rented by minority residents, according to contemporary documents cited by HuffPost and now available on the document-sharing site Scribd.
According to a New York Times report from 1973, when Trump was 27-years-old, the government accused Trump of refusing to rent to prospective tenants, or even negotiate rentals, “because of race and color.”
The NYT story also quoted Trump calling the racial discrimination accusations “absolutely ridiculous.”
His Sunday morning Twitter posts appeared to be addressed directly to House reps Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, and Ilhan Omar of Minnesota. All are American citizens, and all but Omar, who emigrated from Somalia at age 10, were born in the United States.
But in his Twitter thread, Trump told the reps, “you can’t leave fast enough.”
Trump has also publicly called for the execution of five minority teenagers arrested in New York City connection with a violent assault in Central Park in 1989. Even when the so-called “Central Park Five” were exonerated more than a decade later by DNA evidence and a confession of the true perpetrator, Trump continued to declare the five men guilty anyway, even as recently as one month ago, as The Inquisitr has reported.
