Open City, the 1973 program Clinton used to claim Trump was racist.

Read a recent opinion article on CNN, which clearly I know was a mistake now, regarding "Why" Harriet Tubman wouldn't be put on the 20 dollar bill in Trumps era. The author immediately tries to link this to racism, even going as far as to claim a campaign remark by Clinton regarding a 1973 case against Trump Corp. The case is interesting. It comes on the heals of the Open City project that was an effort in the late 60-early 70s to 1)see if landlords discriminated against non-white 2) help place those discriminated in housing. A noble cause at first blush, something most people probably can get behind. The problem sits with two elements here though. If you do some research you'll find that the case wasn't against Trump, mores so a conglomerate of organization. The case was settled with no actual 'guilt'. Now, you could argue that paying off people equals guilt, I wouldn't but I can see why some would believe that.

I dug a little deeper into Betty Hoeber, she was the Director of the Open City project and a driving force to its conclusions and political assumptions. Turns out she had a habit of flaming a situation just to be proven wrong. Betty went on to work for the New York Urban League in the later 1970s and claimed in 1976 another New York group (Coop City) had discriminatory practices as well. Her open calls for their attack were later rebutted when her superiors acknowledged her failure.

"The higher New York Urban League official, Horace W. Morris, executive director, said that “those members of our Open Housing Center responsible for the unsubstantiated allegations against Coop City have been reprimanded.’ Mr. Morris also apologized for their actions."

But Betty's propensity to drop massive allegations to have them walked back not withstanding, I tried to read more on the 1973 case (even getting the original archived document as a reference). What it turns out Trump and crew were being blamed for was actually possible discrimination against 'Welfare' recipients, regardless of color. Not so much racism as classism I suppose? It's hard to see what the exact details were but reading between the lines of quotes, to include one in conclusion of the case that reads “nothing in the agreement that would compel the Trump organization to accept persons on welfare as tenants unless as qualified as other tenants.” leads one to believe that anyone wishing to be in the building most likely had to have their character vouched for if their checkbook couldn't.

My point in all this, it is really critical that people dig when some OpEd in mainstream media today throws out 'facts' to back its opinion. It simply isn't that clear cut.

Open City archived report from 1973
New York Times article on Open City
Coop City Efforts and lack of accuracy

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