If you’ve been on Facebook or Twitter for more than 10 minutes, you’ve seen clickbait articles from the fake news, right-wing website, The Federalist Papers Project.
During September 2017, the website re-distributed on Facebook, the attached meme indicating that President trump was “given the Ellis Island Award for contributing to the conditions on [sic] inner city Black youth.” The meme asks the rhetorical question: “Why doesn’t the mainstream media remember this?” Well the answer is, it didn’t happen, at least, not the way this fake meme suggests. This meme could not be further from the truth and sadly, with a little investigation, the website would know that (if its true intent was to provide truthful commentary).
Yes, in 1986, Donald J. Trump was among 80 named as recipients of the initial awarding of the Ellis Island Awards. The award is presented by the National Ethnic Coalition of Organizations (NECO). It is presented annually to American citizens who have distinguished themselves within their own ethnic groups while exemplifying the values of the American way of life. Please re-read the previous sentence again because this is what it says: You are awarded not for being the best; but rather for being the best in your particular ethnic group.
The people in the above photo (left to right: Joe DiMaggio, Victor Borge, Anita Bryant, Muhammad Ali, Rosa Parks and Donald Trump) were recognized for being the best Italian, Dane, Native American, African-American and German, respectively and not the best American, period. Also among those in that initial group of awardees were Cesar Chavez, Coretta Scott King, Daniel K. Inouye, Zbigniew Brzezinski and John Denver.
Since this initial award, medalist nomination criteria has been refined to now require consideration of academic, professional and humanitarian accolades. Since the change of criteria, the award has been presented to Presidents George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter. Hillary Clinton was recognized in 2002 for her Senate work on behalf of New York after 9-11. This year, an award will be presented to Ohio Governor John Kasich.
So the award, in its initial offering, was significant because it first recognized your heritage as opposed to your accomplishment. The award now focuses on accomplishments first and heritage second.
As for Mr. Trump’s relationship with the Black community? Let’s start with the 1973 Justice Department suit: United States v. Fred C. Trump, Donald Trump, and Trump Management, Inc. The suit stated that the defendants had committed systemic violations of the Fair Housing Act of 1968 in their many complexes–39 buildings, between them containing over 14,000 apartments. The allegations included evidence from black and white “testers” who had sought to rent apartments; the white testers were told of vacancies; the black testers were not, or were steered to apartment complexes with a higher proportion of racial minorities. The complaint also alleged that Trump employees had placed codes next to housing applicant names to indicate if they were black. The matter was settled with a consent decree, signed June 10, 1975, in which Trump was directed to place ads informing minorities they had an equal opportunity to seek housing at his properties. According to a contemporary article in the New York Times, Trump Management was required to furnish the New York Urban League with a weekly list of all apartment vacancies, for two years; the League would get three days to provide qualified applicants for every fifth vacancy in Trump buildings where fewer than 10 percent of the tenants were black. Not one to learn from the experience, Mr. Trump was later sued for the same offense in 1982.
In 1989, in a case later referred to as the Central Park Five, Mr. Trump spent $85,000 placing full-page ads in the four daily papers in New York City, calling for the return of the death penalty for five black and Latino teenagers from Harlem (ages 14 & 15) accused of assaulting and raping a white woman in Central Park. During police interrogation, the teens were denied lawyers, food or drink or sleep and were not permitted to see their parents. They were told they could go home if they confessed to the crime. So they did and the confessions were used to convict them. They were never identified by the victim and were only convicted and sent to prison based upon the coerced confessions. Fourteen years later, DNA evidence exonerated the five and they were later awarded by New York City $40 million ($1 million for every year of their lives wrongfully spent behind bars). Mr. Trump called the settlement a “disgrace, ignoring the fact that a serial rapist named, Matias Reyes, was later convicted of the crime by DNA evidence. To Mr. Trump, it was a disgrace that the city settled because these five were from Harlem and in Central Park; therefore they were up to no good and must be guilty.
So to recap, this initial Ellis Island Award was given to Mr. Trump for being German and nothing more. And over the years, Mr. Trump has demonstrated that he is not a friend of the Black community by any stretch. The website meme is false and should be ignored.
