While it’s no secret that Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and his late father Fred Trump made a great deal of their fortunes in the real estate markets, one might find it interesting to learn that legendary American singer-songwriter Woody Guthrie was once a tenant in one of Fred Trump’s Brooklyn apartments.
On a recent trip to the Woody Guthrie Archives in Tulsa, OK, Professor Will Kaufman uncovered what he characterizes as some of Guthrie’s “most bitter writings.” These were written right around the same time that he lived in Trump’s building, and demonstrate the anger and hostility towards Trump, who was investigated by a U.S. Senate Committee in 1954 for profiteering off of public contracts, and who was also known to take part in discriminatory housing practices. These lyrics paint a much different picture of the same musician who wrote “This Land Is Your Land”:
I suppose
Old Man Trump knows
Just how much
Racial Hate
he stirred up
In the bloodpot of human hearts
When he drawed
That color line
Here at his
Eighteen hundred family project ….
Guthrie even went so far as to write that white supremacists like the Trumps were “way ahead of God” because:
God don’t
know much
about any color lines
You can read the entire story over at Quartz, here.