Woody Guthrie and Fred Trump: A Tale of Tenancy and a Real Estate Empire's Racist Foundations

When Woody Guthrie signed the lease on a new Brooklyn apartment in December 1950, he probably didn't clock the significance of the second signature on the page. His own name sat below that of the man who'd written "This Land Is Your Land," one of the most sweeping calls for equality ever put to music. Below it was the signature of Fred Trump, the real estate mogul who'd go on to build a fortune on segregated housing, a Justice Department discrimination lawsuit, and a Klan-linked arrest that still gets dug up nearly a century later. Guthrie, the Dust Bowl troubadour behind decades of protest songs, had no idea he was about to become his most bitter landlord's most eloquent critic.

A Folk Singer Who'd Already Learned Racism Wasn't Just a Southern Problem

By the time Guthrie moved into Trump's development, he'd travelled a long way from the casual racism of his Oklahoma childhood. He'd figured out that the North had no special claim to racial enlightenment either, and his songwriting reflected it. "The Ferguson Brothers Killing" condemned the 1946 police killing of Charles and Alfonso Ferguson, two unarmed black men shot dead in Freeport, Long Island, after they were refused service at a bus terminal cafe. "Buoy Bells from Trenton" denounced the wrongful 1948 conviction of the "Trenton Six," a group of black men found guilty of murder by an all-white jury in a trial riddled with perjury and manufactured evidence.

Guthrie had form here too. He'd already written two unrecorded songs, "Don't Kill My Baby and My Son" and "High Balladree," about the lynching of Laura and L.D. Nelson, a mother and son murdered by a mob in his home state of Oklahoma. In 1949, he stood alongside Paul Robeson, Howard Fast and Pete Seeger at the Peekskill riots in New York, where white mobs attacked a Robeson concert audience. The violence he witnessed there inspired 21 songs, including "My Thirty Thousand," later recorded by Billy Bragg and Wilco. By the time he arrived at his new apartment, Guthrie wasn't just a folk singer with progressive leanings. He was someone who'd made racial justice a running theme of his work.

Fred Trump Builds an Empire on Segregation

Postwar New York had a housing crisis on its hands, with hundreds of thousands of returning servicemen needing somewhere to live. When the Federal Housing Authority started issuing loans and subsidies for urban apartment blocks, Fred Trump was one of the first developers to cash in, both through construction contracts and by collecting rent on the finished buildings.

Trump wasn't just an aggressive businessman. In 1954, a U.S. Senate committee investigated him for profiteering off public contracts, finding that he'd overestimated his Beach Haven building charges by $3.7 million. And he'd enthusiastically embraced the FHA's guidance on avoiding what the agency euphemistically called "inharmonious uses of housing," which Trump biographer Gwenda Blair has described more plainly as a code phrase for keeping homes in white areas away from black families. Restrictive covenants like these were common across FHA-backed projects nationwide, a quiet betrayal of the New Deal ideals that had created the agency in the first place.

Beach Haven wasn't an isolated case. Racist housing covenants and violent resistance to integration played out across the country in this era, from Trump's Brooklyn developments to incidents like the Cicero race riot of 1951, where a mob of thousands attacked an apartment building in suburban Chicago simply because a black family had moved in.

The Klan Arrest That Still Follows the Trump Name

There's a detail about Fred Trump's early life that resurfaces every election cycle, and it's worth being precise about what's actually documented. In May 1927, a Ku Klux Klan-linked march in Jamaica, Queens turned into a clash with police after more than a thousand robed marchers and hundreds of supporters showed up. Eight men were arrested, and newspaper records list a 21-year-old Fred Trump among them, charged with refusing to disperse when ordered to. His charge was dismissed at arraignment, the only one of the group to be let off that quickly.

What that arrest actually proves is genuinely contested. Fact-checkers, including PolitiFact, have found no solid evidence that Trump wore a robe, marched with the Klan, or held membership. Local spectators, both for and against the march, also got swept up in the confrontation, so his presence alone doesn't confirm participation. It's a real historical record, but not the smoking gun it's often presented as. Naturally, Trump's later commitment to keeping his own developments racially segregated is judged on its own, much better documented, terms. On that theme, if you want to see the flip side of this story, look at Daryl Davis, the Black musician who spent decades personally talking Klansmen out of the movement.

Beach Haven, Guthrie's "Bitch Havens"

Beach Haven sat inland of the Belt Parkway near Coney Island, in the Gravesend section of Brooklyn, a sprawling complex of six-storey brick buildings that Trump had built specifically to cash in on the postwar housing boom. Estimates of its exact size vary by source and by construction phase, ranging from roughly 1,800 to 2,700 apartments, but there's no dispute about who got to live in them. When Guthrie signed his lease, he had no way of knowing the complex was, in practice, whites only.

It didn't take him long to find out. Within a year of moving in, Guthrie was calling his new home "Bitch Havens" in his notebooks, disgusted by the racial uniformity of his neighbours. In one passage, he imagined smashing the colour line entirely, picturing the complex transformed into somewhere genuinely open to everyone, and wrote out an imagined welcome to a black woman he'd invented walking past his window:

These lines sat in Guthrie's private notebooks for decades, essentially unread until a scholar went looking for them. That's a point worth dwelling on: this material existed for over sixty years without being properly transcribed and published, which is exactly why so many retellings of this story lean on a couple of well-worn quotes rather than the fuller picture.

"Old Man Trump": The Song That Took 60 Years to Surface

Guthrie's most direct attack on his landlord came in verse form. He wrote of Trump personifying the racist codes that kept decent housing out of reach for so many of his fellow citizens:

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 ....

He went further, reworking his own Dust Bowl standard "I Ain't Got No Home" into a direct broadside against Trump:

Beach Haven ain't my home!

I just cain't pay this rent!

My money's down the drain!

And my soul is badly bent!

Beach Haven looks like heaven

Where no black ones come to roam!

No, no, no! Old Man Trump!

Old Beach Haven ain't my home!

He also dismissed men like Trump as being "way ahead of God," a line that reads like praise until you get to the punchline: "God dont know much about any color lines." In other words, Trump had out-segregated even the most old-fashioned notion of a wrathful, judgmental deity, and Guthrie meant it as an insult, not a compliment.

None of this was published or performed in Guthrie's lifetime. He died in 1967 from complications of Huntington's disease, and the notebooks sat in the Woody Guthrie Archives in Tulsa until January 2016, when scholar Will Kaufman rediscovered them and published the material for the first time in The Conversation. Later that year, musician Ryan Harvey pieced the fragments into a finished song, working with Guthrie's daughter Nora to complete it, and recorded it with Ani DiFranco and Tom Morello on guitar. It's worth noting the recorded version tweaks one line for a modern audience: where Guthrie's original notebook has Beach Haven looking "like heaven," the 2016 recording swaps in "Beach Haven is Trump's Tower," a wink at the sky-scraping monument to Fred's son that didn't exist when the lyric was first written. The song was released on 19 July 2016, in the thick of that year's presidential race, giving a private 1950s grievance an entirely new life.

The Justice Department Comes Calling

Guthrie didn't live to see it, but the discrimination he'd complained about in his notebooks eventually landed the Trumps in federal court. In October 1973, the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department sued Fred Trump, his son Donald, and their management company, alleging systemic racial discrimination across roughly 14,000 apartments the family managed in Queens, Brooklyn and Staten Island.

The Trumps hired Roy Cohn, the notoriously combative lawyer who'd made his name as Senator Joseph McCarthy's chief counsel, and countersued the government for $100 million, alleging defamation. That countersuit went nowhere, and in June 1975 the case was resolved with a consent decree.

The Trumps admitted no wrongdoing, but agreed to advertise vacancies without discrimination, hand weekly vacancy lists to the New York Urban League for two years, and train staff on fair housing law. A second Justice Department suit followed in 1978, alleging the family was still dragging its feet on compliance.

In 1979, twelve years after Guthrie's death, Village Voice reporter Wayne Barrett published a two-part exposé on the Trump family's business practices, drawing on testimony from the Trumps' own employees. As Barrett summarised it:

According to court records, four superintendents or rental agents confirmed that applications sent to the central [Trump] office for acceptance or rejection were coded by race. Three doormen were told to discourage blacks who came seeking apartments when the manager was out, either by claiming no vacancies or hiking up the rents. A super said he was instructed to send black applicants to the central office but to accept white applications on site. Another rental agent said that Fred Trump had instructed him not to rent to blacks. Further, the agent said Trump wanted "to decrease the number of black tenants" already in the development "by encouraging them to locate housing elsewhere."

Fred and Don Trump

A Legacy That Outlived Both Men

Guthrie's Beach Haven lease ran out after two years, and he moved on without ever recording his Trump songs. Fred Trump kept building, kept collecting government-backed contracts, and handed his business, along with its FHA-blessed segregationist playbook, to his son.

The family's approach to tenants didn't exactly soften with time, either. Decades later, the Trump Organisation was still evicting elderly widows like Mary Filan from their homes, a reminder that Beach Haven wasn't a one-off lapse so much as a house style. It took a scholar rediscovering a folk singer's notebooks in 2016 to make the connection between the man behind "This Land Is Your Land" and the family whose name would go on to top a skyscraper and a presidential ticket in the same lifetime. Guthrie clearly had no time for Old Man Trump. Six decades on, his notebooks are still doing the talking.

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Sources

1. Portside (reproducing Will Kaufman's original Conversation article) — What Woody Guthrie Wrote About 'Old Man Trump': His Racist Landlord — https://portside.org/2016-01-22/what-woody-guthrie-wrote-about-old-man-trump-his-racist-landlord

2. Woody Guthrie Publications / WoodyGuthrie.org — "Old Man Trump" lyrics — https://woodyguthrie.org/Lyrics/Old_Man_Trump.htm

3. NPR — 'Ain't Got No Home': Why Woody Guthrie Despised Donald Trump's Father — https://www.npr.org/2016/01/22/464013683/aint-got-no-home-why-woody-guthrie-despised-donald-trumps-father

4. American Songwriter — Tom Morello, Ani DiFranco, Ryan Harvey Cover Woody Guthrie's Lament Against "Old Man Trump" — https://americansongwriter.com/artists-cover-woody-guthries-lament-old-man-trump/

5. PolitiFact — Here's what's known about Fred Trump's arrest after a KKK clash — https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2019/mar/28/facebook-posts/heres-whats-known-about-fred-trumps-arrest-after-k/

6. Talking Points Memo — How Fred Trump's Mysterious KKK Riot Arrest Resonates Almost a Century Later — https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/how-fred-trumps-mysterious-kkk-riot-arrest-resonates-almost-a-century-later

7. Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse — United States v. Fred C. Trump, Donald Trump, and Trump Management, Inc. — https://clearinghouse.net/case/15342/

8. NPR — Donald Trump's Housing Discrimination Case Still Chases Him Decades Later — https://www.npr.org/2016/09/29/495955920/donald-trump-plagued-by-decades-old-housing-discrimination-case

9. Village Voice (Wayne Barrett, 1979) — How a Young Donald Trump Forced His Way From Avenue Z to Manhattan — http://www.villagevoice.com/2015/07/20/how-a-young-donald-trump-forced-his-way-from-avenue-z-to-manhattan/

10. toritto — Beach Haven, Fred and Woody — https://toritto.wordpress.com/2020/06/03/beach-haven-fred-and-woody/

11. Newsweek — What Renting From Old Man Trump Taught Woody Guthrie — https://www.newsweek.com/what-renting-old-man-trump-taught-woody-guthrie-418840