NEW YORK — When a black woman asked to rent an apartment in a Brooklyn complex managed by Donald Trump’s real estate company, she said she was told that nothing was available. A short time later, a white woman who made the same request was invited to choose between two available apartments.
The two would-be renters on that July 1972 day were actually undercover “testers” for a *government-sanctioned investigation to determine whether Trump Management Inc. discriminated against minorities seeking housing at properties across Brooklyn and Queens.
Federal investigators also gathered evidence. Trump employees had secretly marked the applications of minorities with codes, such as “No. 9” and “C” for “colored,” according to government interview accounts filed in federal court. The employees allegedly directed blacks and Puerto Ricans away from buildings with mostly white tenants, and steered them toward properties that had many minorities, the government filings alleged.
In October 1973, the Justice Department filed a civil rights case that accused the Trump firm, whose complexes contained 14,000 apartments, of violating the Fair Housing Act of 1968.
the July 1972 test at Shorehaven Apartments in Brooklyn, the same superintendent who had rejected the black woman told the white woman who came later that she could “immediately rent either one of two available apartments,” according to testimony.
The tests played out across Queens and Brooklyn and revealed a pattern, the housing activists said in court filings. White testers were encouraged to rent at certain Trump buildings, while the black testers were discouraged, denied or steered to apartment complexes that had more racial minorities, according to the testimony.
Two former Trump employees, a husband and wife who rented properties, were quoted in court documents as saying they were told that the company wanted to rent only to “Jews and Executives” and “discouraged rental to blacks.” The couple told the government’s lawyers that they were advised that “a racial code was in effect, blacks being referred to as ‘No. 9.’ ”
Other rental agents employed by the Trumps told the FBI that only 1 percent of tenants at the Trump-run Ocean Terrace Apartments were black, and that there were no black tenants at Lincoln Shore Apartments. Both were on Ocean Parkway in Brooklyn. However, minorities were steered to a different complex on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn, Patio Gardens, which was 40 percent black, the government said.
One black woman, for example, was turned away at a heavily white complex but told that she should “try to obtain an apartment at Patio Gardens,” where “a black judge had recently become a tenant,” according to government filings.
On June 10, 1975, they signed an agreement prohibiting the Trumps from “discriminating against any person in the terms, conditions, or priveleges of sale or rental of a dwelling.” The Trumps were ordered to “thoroughly acquaint themselves personally on a detailed basis” with the Fair Housing Act.
The agreement also required the Trumps to place ads informing minorities they had an equal opportunity to seek housing at their properties.
The government “had the [racial] coding, they had the testers , and had the testimony of people who worked there,” said Goldweber, now a private practice lawyer in New York. “It was an important, significant step for enforcement of the Fair Housing Act. It was a big deal.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/poli...90163e-bfbe-11e5-bcda-62a36b394160_story.html
Pimp caught protecting and defending racism...AGAIN!
