Woody Guthrie Despised His Landlord Fred Trump – Donald’s Father

No real surprise there – it’s safe to assume that the hard-travellin’ leftist folk radical had little sympathy for a New York real estate capitalist. It’s still interesting to read the piece over at Gawker, as the story sheds some light on the racism at the core of the Trump empire:

“What Guthrie discovered all too late was Trump’s enthusiastic embrace of the FHA’s guidelines for avoiding “inharmonious uses of housing” – or as Trump biographer Gwenda Blair puts it, “a code phrase for selling homes in white areas to blacks.” As Blair points out, such “restrictive covenants” were common among FHA projects – a betrayal, if ever there was one, of the New Deal vision that had given birth to the agency.

Only a year into his Beach Haven residency, Guthrie – himself a veteran – was already lamenting the bigotry that pervaded his new, lily-white neighborhood, which he’d taken to calling “Bitch Havens.””

Stories like this are also a reminder that segregation was (and in many ways still is) not just a Southern issue.