The one thing you can count on with Donald Trump is that he always repeats himself, and not in a good way. Remember the time that the Justice Department sued the Trump family real estate business in 1973 for discrimination against blacks? Hillary Clinton mentioned it at the first presidential debate in September, much to the chagrin of Trump.
"Donald started his career back in 1973 being sued by the Justice Department for racial discrimination because he would not rent apartments in one of his developments to African-Americans," she said.
Trump dismissed Clinton and the suit, noting his company wasn’t alone in being sued and that it had settled the matter with no admission of guilt.
That was the first time Trump was sued for housing discrimination. The second time, in 1982, didn’t come up in the debates and he hasn’t mentioned it. Small wonder.
In April 1982, the Open Housing Center, a fair housing advocacy outfit, filed class action lawsuits against several landlords and real estate brokers on behalf of nine African Americans who had been denied apartments in Queens. (The Open Housing Center had years earlier provided the Justice Department with information used in the 1973 housing discrimination case against Fred and Donald Trump.) The defendants in these suits included Fred Trump and Coronet Hall Inc., a Trump company that owned an apartment building in Queens. Donald Trump was not named in the lawsuits, but at that point, he was an owner of Coronet Hall and a senior officer of Trump Management Inc., which controlled various Trump companies, including Coronet Hall.
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The suits charged Fred Trump and Coronet Hall Inc with:
"steering black persons away from predominantly white apartment buildings and into predominantly black or racially mixed apartment buildings, denying housing or making housing unavailable on the basis of race, discriminating in the provision of brokerage services and representing to persons that dwellings are not available for inspection, sale or rental when such dwellings are in fact so available, based on the race of those persons." These actions, the suits asserted, violated the Fair Housing Act and various civil rights laws.
The Trumps denied the allegations and again fought the suit for two years with the other defendants, but, in 1984 they and the others settled without any admission of guilt.
Patterns, patterns, patterns, thy name is Trump.
