'Racial Hate': A famed folk singer, Trump's dad and angry lyrics at a Tulsa landmark
One of the signs that will greet President Trump on Saturday in Tulsa reads “This Machine Kills Fascists.”
It’s affixed to a guitar on a huge mural painted on the side of the Woody Guthrie Center, just six blocks from the arena where Trump is holding his first campaign rally during the novel coronavirus pandemic.
The Woody Guthrie Center is dedicated to the work of one of the nation’s greatest folk singers and most influential songwriters. Born in Oklahoma, Woody Guthrie is best known for the ballad, “This Land Is Your Land,” which some people consider an alternative national anthem. But Guthrie penned hundreds of other songs, too, and one of them was about Trump’s father, Fred Trump.
In 1950, Trump’s father was Guthrie’s landlord in Brooklyn. Guthrie didn’t think much of Fred Trump when he wrote these unrecorded and unpublished lyrics, which were found in the Guthrie Center’s archives in 2016 by Will Kaufman, a professor of American culture at the University of Central Lancashire in Great Britain.
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
Here at his
Eighteen hundred family project …
https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2020/06/20/woody-guthrie-fred-trump-tulsa-lyrics/
