Illustration by Tess Brzycki
Ever since coming down the Trump Tower escalator to launch his presidential campaign with a direct appeal to racists by labeling Mexican immigrants as rapists and murderers, Donald Trump has been at war with the historic U.S. civil rights laws passed in the 1960s.
Trump is ramping up that racist rhetoric again as November approaches. In a televised interview, Trump suggested there’s actually been very little racial progress from the three major civil rights laws Democratic President Lyndon Johnson passed—the comprehensive Civil Rights Act in 1964, the Voting Rights Act in 1965 and the Fair Housing Act in 1968. “If you take a look at what Lyndon Johnson did, how has it worked out?” Trump sneered.
Well, it’s true those laws didn’t prevent a racist demagogue from becoming president. But Trump’s latest blast from the past trying to scare “suburban housewives” into fearing Joe Biden might enforce that fair housing law and allow black people to “invade their neighborhood” suggests Trump is wrong. He simply has no idea how racially and politically diverse many suburbs have become. Not only could there already be a mixed-race family living next door, but suburban voters helped flip control of the U.S. House of Representatives from Republican toDemocratic control two years ago.
Fight for Fair Housing
For Milwaukee, Trump’s fight against fair housing seems like old times again. Milwaukeeans, black and white, are still proud of their families’ participation in Milwaukee’s civil rights movement, whose importance President Johnson cited when he signed the Fair Housing Act into law. Johnson said Milwaukee called national attention to the need to end racial discrimination in housing. He wasn’t talking about the city’s mayor or its electedCommon Council, except for one member.
Alderwoman Vel Phillips, the only African American person and only woman on the Council, and Father James Groppi, a white Catholic priest advising the NAACP Youth Council, led hundreds of young activists in more than 200 nights of civil rights marches beginning in August 1967. They were supporting the proposed ordinance repeatedly introduced by Phillips, which would have banned housing discrimination, that always failed because she was the only vote. Mayor Henry Maier said he wouldn’t support banning racial discrimination in housing until a majority of Milwaukee’s 26 suburbs passed the ordinance first. In other words, never.
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On the first two nights when the open housing marches crossed the 16th Street Viaduct into the segregated, white, working-class South Side, 200 marchers were met by thousands of white people screaming hatred and hurling rocks, bottles and even human waste. Some waved Confederate flags and carried obscene signs with swastikas, ugly practices by hate groups in those days now experiencing a revival under Trump.
Nixon vs. Trump
In fact, Trump’s current attack on the U.S fair housing law is like old times again for him, too. In 1973, Republican President Richard Nixon’s Justice Department filed one of its largest discrimination cases under the fair housing law against Fred Trump and his 27-year-old son Donald. Investigators said the Trumps marked minority applications for rental units in their buildings with the codes “No. 9” or “C” for “colored,” automatically rejecting them.
The Trumps’ attorney, Roy Cohn, the sleazy former aide to Wisconsin’s Republican Sen. Joseph McCarthy, who was later disbarred, filed a $100 million defamation suit against the government. Young Donald held bombastic press conferences accusing federal officials of “outrageous lies.” But after two years of fighting the charges in court, the Trumps settled the case and agreed to run newspaper ads publicly welcoming African American applicants.
Needless to say, for Trump, the civil-rights-free 1950s era of McCarthy and Cohn was the Golden Age of politics. Perhaps that’s why Trump demeans female voters by referring to them as “housewives.” Someone, perhaps White House housewife Melania, should tell Trump that most women have careers and full-time jobs these days. “Housewife” is an archaic term from an old black-and-white TV commercial of a woman dancing around her kitchen singing about how sparkling her dish detergent got the plates.
Trump may not have noticed any effect from U.S. civil rights laws on the family real estate business he inherited, which primarily employs immediate family members. But most American workplaces have changed enormously since the ’60s by employing people from a much wider variety of cultures and backgrounds. Trump has missed a lot and obviously lives in a very small world.
Johnson signed the Fair Housing Act on April 11, 1968, a week after the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis, Tenn. After racial discrimination in housing was outlawed nationally, Milwaukee’s Common Council met on April 30 and passed an ordinance to do the same thing by a vote of 15 to 4.
Vel Phillips said Milwaukee finally had to admit it was part of America and had to obey its laws. Like Sam Cooke said, a change is gonna come, and someday soon Donald Trump is going to learn the same thing.
Joel McNally was a critic and columnist for the Milwaukee Journal for 27 years. He has written the weekly Taking Liberties column for the Shepherd Express since 1996.
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