Reprinted from Consortium News
In his acceptance speech for the Republican presidential nomination, Donald Trump declared, "My Dad, Fred Trump, was the smartest and hardest working man I ever knew...It's because of him that I learned, from my youngest age, to respect the dignity of work and the dignity of working people."
Donald apparently forgot what his father taught him. The GOP nominee refuses to pay the people who work for him. "Among them: a dishwasher in Florida. A glass company in New Jersey. A carpet company. A plumber. Painters. Forty-eight waiters. Dozens of bartenders and other hourly workers at his resorts and clubs, coast to coast. Real estate brokers who sold his properties. And, ironically, several law firms that once represented him in these suits and others," wrote Steve Reilly in USA Today.
Moreover, Fred Trump, "the smartest" man his son ever knew, did not respect the dignity of black people. The legendary folk singer Woody Guthrie rented an apartment in the elder Trump's Brooklyn complex in 1950. It turned out blacks were not welcome there.
University of Central Lancashire professor Will Kaufman, a student of Guthrie's life and songs, noted that Guthrie thought "Fred Trump was one who stirs up racial hate, and implicitly profits from it," lamenting "the bigotry that pervaded his new, lily-white neighborhood."
Guthrie responded to Fred Trump's bigotry with this song:
I supposeOld 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
The acorn did not fall far from the tree of racial prejudice. In 1973, the Nixon Justice Department sued Fred and Donald Trump for systematic discrimination against African-Americans in housing rentals.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).