WOODY Guthrie, the venerated American singer-songwriter who wrote and sang "This Land is Your Land" and other haunting songs about justice, freedom and human dignity, stayed for two years at a Brooklyn apartment complex owned and operated by real estate developer Fred Trump in the early 1950s. In early 2016, just months before Fred's son Donald won that year's presidential elections, Will Kaufman, a Guthrie scholar and professor of American literature at the University of Lancashire, found a few unrecorded songs written by Guthrie in 1954 while doing research at the Guthrie Archives in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Two of those songs were titled "Old Man Trump" and "I Ain't Got No Home." Both were about the older Trump's racist housing policies and discriminatory housing practices. Blacks and other people of color were banned from signing leases on his apartments, which the unrecorded Guthrie songs condemned. The lyrics of "Old Man Trump" read in part: "I suppose / Old Man Trump knows / Just how much racial hate / He stirred up / In the bloodpot of human hearts / When he drawed / that color line..."
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