Woody Guthrie and Fred Trump: A Tale of Tenancy and a Real Estate Empire's Racist Foundations
Updated: Oct 6
In December 1950, Woody Guthrie signed the lease on a new apartment in Brooklyn. He was 38, the author of This Land Is Your Land and the Dust Bowl troubadour behind decades of protest songs. His new landlord was Fred Trump, a developer busy building a fortune out of government-backed housing that Black families weren't allowed to rent. Guthrie worked out what kind of place he'd moved into within a year, and he did what he always did. He wrote about it. Then the pages sat unread in his notebooks for more than six decades.
Quick Answers
● Was Fred Trump really Woody Guthrie's landlord? Yes. Guthrie rented at Beach Haven, Trump's complex near Coney Island, from December 1950 to December 1952.
● What did Guthrie write about him? Notebook verses and prose attacking the colour line at Beach Haven and blaming “Old Man Trump” for drawing it.
● Did Guthrie record a song called Old Man Trump? No. The 2016 recording was stitched together from three separate pieces of his writing, and the title came later.
● Was Fred Trump in the Klan? There's no proof. He was one of seven men arrested after a Klan march in Queens in 1927, and he was discharged.
● Did the segregation ever reach a courtroom? The Justice Department sued Fred and Donald Trump for housing discrimination in 1973. They settled in 1975 without admitting wrongdoing.
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 also worked out that the North had no special claim to racial enlightenment, and his songwriting showed it. The Ferguson Brothers Killing condemned the 1946 police shooting of Charles and Alfonso Ferguson, two unarmed Black men killed in Freeport, Long Island, after they were refused service at a bus terminal cafe. Buoy Bells from Trenton took on the 1948 conviction of the Trenton Six, a group of Black men found guilty of murder by an all-white jury.
He had form at home too. He'd written two songs about the lynching of Laura and L.D. Nelson, a mother and son murdered by a mob in his home state. In 1949 he stood alongside Paul Robeson and Pete Seeger at Peekskill, New York, where white mobs attacked the audience at a Robeson concert. He got 21 songs out of what he saw there. So the man who turned up at Beach Haven with his wife Marjorie and their three small children, Arlo, Joady and Nora, wasn't a folk singer with vaguely progressive leanings. Racial justice had been running through his work for years.
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 Administration started handing out loans and subsidies for urban apartment blocks, Fred Trump was one of the first developers in the queue. He made money building the blocks and then made more collecting the rent.
He wasn't shy about how he did it. In 1954 a US Senate committee investigated him for profiteering on public contracts and found he'd overstated his Beach Haven costs by $3.7 million. He'd also taken on board the FHA's own guidance against what it called “inharmonious uses of housing”. Trump biographer Gwenda Blair has translated that as “a code phrase for selling homes in white areas to blacks”. Rules like these ran through FHA-backed projects all over the country, which was a strange outcome for an agency born out of the New Deal.
Beach Haven wasn't a one-off, either. The fight over who could live where was playing out across America in these years, sometimes with mobs. In suburban Chicago it produced the Cicero race riot of 1951, when thousands of people attacked an apartment building because a Black family had rented a flat in it. In Louisville three years later, a house sold to a Black family was bombed and the white couple who'd helped them buy it were prosecuted for it.
The Klan Arrest That Still Follows the Trump Name
One detail from Fred Trump's early life resurfaces every election cycle, so it's worth being exact about what the record shows. On Memorial Day 1927, a Ku Klux Klan march through Jamaica, Queens ended in a brawl between around a thousand Klansmen and a hundred police. Seven men were arrested. The New York papers listed a Fred Trump of Devonshire Road, Jamaica among them, held for refusing to disperse when ordered to. He was 21. He was also the only one of the seven to be discharged without the case going any further.
What that proves is another matter. PolitiFact went through the surviving reports and found nothing to show that Trump wore a robe, marched with the Klan or was a member. Bystanders on both sides got swept up in the fighting, so being arrested near the parade doesn't tell you which side of it he was on. Asked about it in 2015, Donald Trump said it never happened, which the newspaper record doesn't support either. The honest answer is that nobody knows why Fred Trump was there. His later record as a landlord is far better documented and can be judged on its own. For the other side of the Klan story, there's Daryl Davis, the Black musician who spent decades talking Klansmen out of the movement.
Beach Haven, or “Bitch Havens”
Beach Haven sat just inland of the Belt Parkway near Coney Island, a sprawl of six-storey brick blocks built to soak up the postwar demand. Counts of its size vary with the source and the construction phase. Guthrie himself put it at 1,800 families, while Magnum's report on the estate gives 2,700 apartments. Nobody disputes who got to live in them. In practice the place was whites only, and Guthrie had no way of knowing that when he signed.
It didn't take him long to find out. Within a year he was calling his new home “Bitch Havens” in his notebooks. In one passage he pictured the colour line gone and the whole complex open to anyone. He invented a young Black woman walking past his window and wrote her a welcome, telling her she was wanted there as a neighbour.
He saved his sharpest line for the men who ran such places. They were, he wrote, ahead of God himself, and he didn't mean it kindly: “God dont know much about any color lines.”
The Songs About “Old Man Trump”
Guthrie's most direct attack came in verse. One piece addresses Trump by name and supposes he knows exactly how much racial hatred he stirred up when he drew his colour line through a family housing project. Another reworks Guthrie's own Dust Bowl standard, I Ain't Got No Home, into a tenant's complaint. The singer can't pay the rent, his money's gone, and the place looks like heaven only because no Black families are allowed in it. The refrain tells Old Man Trump, several times over, that Beach Haven isn't his home. The full text is on the official Woody Guthrie site.
Here's the part most retellings get wrong. Guthrie never wrote a song called Old Man Trump. Will Kaufman, the scholar who found the material, has pointed out that it's three separate pieces. Guthrie's own headings were Beach Haven Ain't My Home, Beach Haven Race Hate and Trump Made a Tramp Out of Me. The umbrella title was a condition set by the Guthrie family when the words were licensed.
There's a sad footnote to the dates as well. On 3 September 1952, while he was still a Beach Haven tenant, Guthrie was diagnosed at Brooklyn State Hospital with Huntington's chorea, the disease that had killed his mother. He left Beach Haven that December for Howard Beach in Queens. He never recorded a word of what he'd written about his landlord, and he died in 1967.
How the Notebooks Came to Light
The pages ended up in the Woody Guthrie Archives in Tulsa, where Kaufman, a professor at the University of Central Lancashire, came across them. He published them for the first time in January 2016, while Fred Trump's son was leading the race for the Republican nomination.
That summer the Baltimore songwriter Ryan Harvey set the words to music, working with Nora Guthrie to edit the three fragments into one song with as few changes as possible. He recorded it with Ani DiFranco and Tom Morello at DiFranco's home studio in New Orleans. Harvey admitted to one liberty. A reference to Trump's heaven became Trump's Tower, a nod to a building that didn't exist when Guthrie was paying rent.
The Justice Department Comes Calling
Guthrie didn't live to see it, but the practices he'd complained about eventually landed the Trumps in federal court. On 15 October 1973, the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division sued Fred Trump, his son Donald and Trump Management, alleging racial discrimination across 39 buildings and more than 14,000 apartments. Part of the evidence came from testers. White applicants were sent to buildings where Black applicants had just been turned away, and offered the flats.
The Trumps hired Roy Cohn, the combative lawyer who'd made his name as Senator Joseph McCarthy's chief counsel, and countersued the government for $100 million. The judge threw the counterclaim out. On 10 June 1975 the case ended in a consent decree. The Trumps admitted nothing, but agreed to advertise vacancies to everyone, train their staff in fair housing law and send weekly vacancy lists to the New York Urban League for two years. The government went back to court in 1978, saying the family wasn't keeping its side of the bargain.
In 1979, Village Voice reporter Wayne Barrett went through the court file for a two-part investigation of the family business. What he found came from the Trumps' own staff. Superintendents and rental agents said applications sent to head office were marked by race. Doormen said they'd been told to put off Black applicants by claiming there were no vacancies or quoting a higher rent. One rental agent said Fred Trump had told him outright not to rent to Black tenants, and to nudge the ones already there into leaving.
A Legacy That Outlived Both Men
Fred Trump kept building, kept collecting government-backed contracts and handed the business to his son. The family's approach to tenants didn't soften much. Decades later the Trump Organisation was still evicting elderly widows like Mary Filan.
Beach Haven is still standing. When Magnum photographer Bruce Gilden visited in 2016 he found it clean, relatively cheap and mostly home to Russian and Ukrainian immigrants. Residents couldn't agree on how many Black families lived there. Sixty-odd years after Guthrie imagined a different set of neighbours outside his window, his notebooks had finally been read.
