After the rape of a white female jogger in Central Park in 1989, Trump aroused controversy in New York’s black community when he took out full-page newspaper ads calling for the death penalty for the African-American teenage suspects — who were all later exonerated. One of the defendant’s lawyers, Colin Moore, compared Trump’s stance to the racist attitudes expressed in the 1930s during the infamous “Scottsboro Boys” case. Trump tried to mend relations by visiting a black woman who had been raped and thrown off the roof of a building in the hospital, promising to pay her medical expenses, according to several news reports.
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Yet the most damaging episode in the saga of Trump’s fractured relationship with the black community came in 1973, when his family’s real-estate company, Trump Management Corporation, was sued by the Justice Department for alleged racial discrimination. At the time, Trump was the company’s president. Just last month, at Trump’s Comedy Central roast, Snoop Dogg referenced the case by joking about Trump’s potential 2012 run for the White House: “Why not? It wouldn’t be the first time he pushed a black family out of their home.”
The case alleged that the Trump Management Corporation had discriminated against blacks who wished to rent apartments in Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island. The government charged the corporation with quoting different rental terms and conditions to blacks and whites and lying to blacks that apartments were not available, according to reports of the lawsuit.
Trump responded in characteristic fashion — holding a press conference to call the charges “absolutely ridiculous.” He told the New York Times: “We never have discriminated and we never would. There have been a number of local actions against us and we’ve won them all. We were charged with discrimination and we proved in court that we did not discriminate.”
He later took the uncommon step of suing the Justice Department for defamation, seeking $100 million in damages. His lawyer was Roy Cohn, the infamous former Joseph McCarthy aide, who was known for his hard-ball tactics.
Cohn called up the federal official in charge of the case — J. Stanley Pottinger, the head of DOJ’s Civil Rights division — to demand that the lawyer handling the lawsuit be fired. Pottinger told The Huffington Post that his reaction at the time was “I don’t think so. That’s up to me and that’s not going to happen. I called [lawyer] Donna [Goldstein] into my office and said, ‘Keep up the good work.’” The suit, which Pottinger called a “media gimmick done for local consumption,” was dismissed and the judge criticized Cohn for “wasting time and paper from what I consider to be the real issues” - discriminating against blacks in apartment rentals.
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