Fred Trump's Housing Project

 

Folk singer Woody Guthrie (famed for This Land is Your Land, This Land is My Land) complained about Donald Trump's father, Fred Trump, in song. 

I suppose that Old Man Trump knows just how much racial hate 
He stirred up in that bloodpot of human hearts 
When he drawed that color line. . . 

From: https://woodyguthrie.org/Lyrics/Old_Man_Trump.htm

The multi-building project called Shore Haven, an FHA (Federal Housing Authority) supported project.

Fred Trump's Housing Project

Fred Trump, father of ex-president Donald Trump, was a real estate and housing developer active in New York City. In the 1970s, he was sued for discriminating against minorities as tenants with employees testifying that they were not to rent to blacks or Puerto Ricans. His settlement was the largest for that type of suit up to the time.

I decided to take advantage of census information and look at the make-up of Fred Trump's tenants during an earlier period.

Census material is available to the public only after 70 years and the 1950 census is accessible online. 

Along with identifying where individuals lived, this census included race listed as: W (White), Neg (Negro), American Indian (Ind), Japanese (Jap), Chinese (Chi), Filipino (Fil), and other (spell out). The country of birth was noted (as well as other information). 

The Shore Haven Housing Complex.

According to a seminar on the history of the neighborhood presented by CUNY:

"In 1949, Shore Haven Apartments were built by Fred Trump on 21st Avenue near the Belt Parkway. The apartments were built over 16 acres and were mostly six-story buildings. Thirty-eight buildings were built, resulting in 1,344 apartments for families. Also, parts of Cropsey Avenue were used to built (sic) a shopping center as part of the housing project. At that time, this was the largest private housing development in Brooklyn."

The above article goes on to say that this neighborhood was the fictional setting of such movies and television shows as Saturday Night Fever, Welcome Back Kotter, and The Honeymooners.

Census Data

Census information regarding the Shore Haven Apartments is available online and listed as Enumeration Districts 24-2405 to 24-2409, Kings County, New York, comprising 149 census pages and 5 summary pages. Up to 30 individuals are presented per page.

I went through the pages and hand-counted households, number of residents, ethnicity, and country of birth. Very few apartments at Shore Haven were listed as vacant. 

The census enumerated 1301 households with 3717 tenants. 

So, what is the racial make-up of the entries? This was easy to determine: page after page, the same. All the entries (100%) where race was noted were W (white). There were not any labeled as Negroes, Chinese, Japanese, American Indian, Filipino, or Other. There were two tenants listed as born in Africa (country unspecified) and white, two born in China and white, one born in Japan (white), and one born in Haiti (white). The Japanese birth is listed as an infant and it is quite possible that the parents had been there for post-World War II military reasons.

Countries of birth were noted, with 589 individuals identified as born outside of the United States. These are the countries, other than America, with at least five individuals (hand-counted):

Russia 202

Poland 86

Austria 48

England 33

Italy 28

Germany 27

Romania 23

Canada 22

Hungary 19

Czechoslovakia 14

France 9

Holland 8

Lithuania 7

Chile 5

Switzerland 5

I did not attempt an analysis of surnames, however, I did note that there were many classically Jewish names, suggesting little to no exclusion for this reason. The large number of Eastern Europeans may also have reflected Jewish immigration. 

I realized early on that, among the countries of birth, Ireland was not mentioned. I eventually ran into one entry, listed as a mother-in-law, suggesting that the wife (born in the U.S.), was also of Irish ancestry.

Were the Irish also discriminated against? Of course, you don't have to be born in Ireland to have Irish heritage. The only other way of approaching this matter was to look at surnames. I could not determine the origin of all surnames and some surnames can be either Irish or from another country. As a compromise, I decided to search the listings for what are described as the top twenty Irish surnames in the United States. I came across a single entry: a family named Murphy. It can be argued that Bensonhurst is not a particularly Irish neighborhood. Nevertheless, out of over 3700 individuals, so few being Irish seems beyond chance. Bensonhurst is not a particularly British neighborhood, and yet there were 33 entries born in England and two from Scotland.

The 1970s lawsuit against Fred Trump also said that he discriminated against renting to Puerto Ricans. One tenant in the census was listed as born in Puerto Rico: listed with another family. Her occupation, maid, presumably a live-in maid. 

The large predominance of foreign-born individuals in the Shore Haven project came from Europe. Ex-President Donald Trump has recently complained of immigrants from virtually every continent but Europe. 

"They’re poisoning the blood of our country," Trump told the crowd at a rally in New Hampshire. "That’s what they’ve done. They poison mental institutions and prisons all over the world, not just in South America, not just to three or four countries that we think about, but all over the world. They’re coming into our country from Africa, from Asia, all over the world."

Trump Tower

The folk singer, Woody Guthrie, moved into another Fred Trump housing complex in late 1950, Beach Haven. His song summed up the situation:

Beach Haven is Trump's Tower

Where no black folks come to roam.

Fred Trump in the 1980s

My recent novel, Floor 24, set in Manhattan in the 1920s is available from Oliver-Heber books.

Floor 24
Oliver-Heber Books

"From the mob underworld to the tops of new skyscrapers, Floor 24 is a heart-thumping New York 1920's historical mystery!" - Holly Newman, bestselling author of A Chance Inquiry mystery series.

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The Black Female Detective in Mystery Literature

When comparing the impact of racial prejudice to that of misogyny, it is worth noting that the United States allowed black males the right to vote 50 years before they gave females full suffrage (black or white). Correspondingly, the acceptance of black male detectives in mystery literature was slow in coming but preceded that of black female detectives.

Suffrage in the United States.

• White male: 1789.
• Black male: 1870.
• Female: 1920.

The Relative Rarity of the Black Female Protagonist in Mysteries.

The initial pioneer was all but forgotten, her efforts not repeated for decades. The editor of Colored American magazine, Pauline Hopkins, wrote a mystery novel in serial format in 1901-02 called Hagar's Daughter. Here, a black maid, who goes by the name Venus, is treated as an equal partner in solving the crime alongside a black male detective.

Being in public domain, the book is available for free on-line.

The next occasion? Over the decades to follow, male black detectives (although not many) appeared in book form, notably the works of Chester Himes and a peak coming after the popularity of the 1967 film, "In the Heat of the Night."

On television a remarkable early entry into the female black detective field came in the form of Get Christie Love, a made-for-television movie followed by a one-year series that first aired in 1974. The next example of a female black detective getting the title role in a television series? Rashida Jones in Angie Tribeca (2016).

During the blaxploitation era of the seventies, Angela Harpe (The Dark Angel) made her way into four pot-boiled novels, all written in 1975 by James D. Lawrence. Promoted as being the female Shaft, she was an ex-police officer who (wince) worked on the side as a high-price call girl and ex-fashion model who then became a high-priced private eye. I have not read the books, but several critics have described them as soft-porn, racist and misogynist.

In 1984, Susan Moody, now the author of over twenty novels, began a series of mysteries featuring Penny Wanawake, a photographer and amateur sleuth. The first of these was the novel, Penny Black. The book was ranked #56 in the 1990 Crime Writers' Association's list of all-time-best mystery novels.

I have read the first in the series. On the plus side, the character is a strong heroine, the mystery is compelling, and much of the dialogue is smart and brassy. Still, the international, globe-trotting near-perfect Wanawake was more of a fantasy figure than a character.

The late 1980s also hosted the appearance of a single volume of Clio Browne: Private Investigator. An internet rumor says that the author Delores Komo was actually a pen name of the horror author, Dean Koontz. The Bibliography of Crime Fiction states that she was Dolores Komoroski who died a couple of years after the book came out.

The 1990s brought us several black female detectives and finally their presence was more than a rarity. Black female writers led the way.

Bland's Detective Marti McAllister graced some cool book covers.

The Black Female Detective Written by Black Female Authors.

One breakthrough came in the form of Blanche White, first appearing in Blanche on the Lam, in 1992. The author, Barbara Neely, described herself as being schooled by the novels of Toni Morrison and although the main character is a maid, the choice of occupation is a commentary on race and roles. Blanche's character is strong-willed and defiant. Her ties to her family and community are important in solving the mystery, which plays out in classic Southern gothic form among the genteel and mentally unbalanced rich. Neeley knows how to wield both comedy and cutting social criticism. The novel received several awards including the Agatha Award for best first novel. Neely went on to write three sequels.

About the same time, Nora DeLoach came out with the character, Grace "Candi" Covington who appeared in Mama Solves A Murder, 1994, along with seven more entries in this cozy series.

Nora DeLoach spent much of her life as a social worker venturing into writing in her fifties. Among all of my job experiences, social work provided me with the best understanding of character from the unalloyed humanness of the desperate to the pomposity of bureaucrats.

In the hands of less diligent authors, the maid and the mother figure could have played out as stock characters. In both of the above cases, they were given a fierce humanity.

The author Eleanor Taylor Bland first presented the world with the female police detective, Marti MacAlister in Dead Time, 1992. MacAlister is a strong woman who must balance career and family while solving crimes. For Bland, racial commentary often appeared in the subject matter of the plot. In the 2003 novel, Fatal Remains, MacAlister and her partner deal with murder at the excavation of a site that was said to have been part of the Underground Railway for slaves, but may have had more sinister uses.

The late 1990s brought the arrival of LAPD Detective Charlotte Justice in Inner City Blues, by Paula L. Woods. Misogyny and racial tension are up-front and center as Det. Justice is plunged into the midst of the "Rodney King" riots and becomes involved in solving the mystery of who killed the man who killed her husband and child. The internal politics and prejudices of the LAPD make a formidable, albeit uncomfortable, backdrop to the novel which went on to win the Macavity Award and spawned three sequels.

The voices of black female authors offered an authenticity to the above novels. No longer were prejudice and racial issues defined solely in the "black and white" stories familiar to middle-class white consciousness. As much as anything, racism comes out in a thousand small ways. The protagonists experience both an external and internalized struggle.

The most successful mystery series featuring a black female detective began in the 1990s with Alexander McCall Smith's The Number 1 Ladies Detective Agency, 1998. Set in Botswana, the private detective Precious Ramotswe takes a mostly gentle and intuitive approach to solving crimes. It is always a delicate balance for someone who could be described as being from the colonial class to undertake writing about another culture. Smith mostly avoids falling into traps by exuding love for his characters and for their nation. In doing so, he consciously seeks to define Botswana on its terms rather than something that is foreign. Is this love enough? Love without condescension is better than the alternatives.

I am half-Latino. Although none of this heritage appears in my facial features, I grew up raised by my mother, who was what was then called a Chicano activist. Perhaps it is this undercover persona that has provided me with a sense of otherness as I approached writing. I grew up on a farm and in the urban city, the smallish isolated town and the medium-sized town, in the cold and in the heat. For me, every culture, even my own is foreign to me.

My novel, Never Kill A Friend, (Ransom Note Press, 2015) features a black female detective. This choice seemed inevitable. I had decided to set the novel in Washington, DC, and the Washington of which I am familiar is the urban city with the national politics just being background noise. As I have said before: urban DC is Duke Ellington; political DC is John Phillips Souza on a tuba. I was immersed in urban DC and had only occasional glimmers of the weirdness of the political side. As a second reason for choosing a black protagonist, I had just finished researching a lot of African-American history for a different project.

I am proud to have contributed to the increased presence of black female detectives. As to how successfully I have honored the genre, I will leave that to others to judge.

Never Kill A Friend, Ransom Note Press

Never Kill A Friend is available for purchase in hard cover format and as an ebook.
The story follows Shelley Krieg, an African-American detective for the Washington DC Metro PD as she tries to undo a wrong which sent an innocent teenager to prison.

Hard cover: Amazon US
Kindle: Amazon US
Hard cover: Amazon UK
Kindle: Amazon UK
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