Court documents, however, show that putting the allegations behind him was tougher than the candidate suggests.
Three years after the consent decree, the Justice Department went back to court to say the Trumps were not complying with the settlement. The claim was not resolved before the decree expired.
Then, in 1982, Trump Management and eight other New York City landlords were hit with a class-action discrimination lawsuit by a housing advocacy group. Two years later, they settled by agreeing to rent one of every four vacant apartments in some neighborhoods to blacks, according to a New York Times account from the time.
The breadth of the allegations doesn't surprise Maxine Brown, who applied for an apartment in a Queens building owned by Fred Trump in 1963.
"I was turned away because of my color," said Brown, 86, whose account was first reported by the New York Times in August.
Brown's application was taken by rental agent Stanley Leibowitz, who said there's no doubt Brown didn't get the apartment because she's black — and no doubt that Donald Trump, then just 17, knew that.
"Mr. Trump and his son Donald came into the office. I asked what I should do with this application because she's calling constantly and his response to me was, 'You know I don't rent to the N-word. Put it in a drawer and forget about it,'" Leibowitz, 89, told NBC News.
"Donald Trump was right alongside his father when I was instructed to do that."
Brown also filed a complaint with the Human Rights Commission and was offered an apartment after the hearing; she still lives there. Fortt also took an apartment in a Trump building as a settlement.
"I wasn't interested in suing Trump. I wasn't interested in getting money. What I wanted was a place to live," she said.
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