Trump's History Undermines New Outreach to Black Voters

Housing



Trump made a fortune before his career as a reality TV star predominately in the world of real estate, where he took the reins of his father's burgeoning housing empire in the early 1970s and expanded it to become the global juggernaut it purportedly is today. But in 1973, he was introduced on the national stage for less auspicious reasons: his battles with the U.S. Justice Department over charges of violating the Fair Housing Act. The Trumps were accused of systematically discriminating against black tenants seeking rentals in their buildings, even using a code letter "C" to represent "colored" applicants.


Crime



In 1989, he infamously took out four full-page ads in local New York City newspapers calling for the restoration of the death penalty in the state, particularly so it could be enforced on the so-called Central Park Five, a group of black and Latino teens accused of beating and raping a white female woman who had been jogging in the city's iconic park that April.

Years later, when the real perpetrator confessed, and the Central Park Five were exonerated (it was determined that their initial confessions were coerced), Trump refused to back down. When the city of New York agreed in 2014 to pay the young men $41 million in damages for spending years in prisons for a crime they didn't commit, Trump called it the "heist of the century" and a "disgrace" in an unrepentant op-ed for the New York Daily News.

read more: http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2016-election/trump-s-history-undermines-new-outreach-black-voters-n635821