What primary-source newspapers list Fred Trump among the arrests at the 1927 Queens KKK clash?
Executive summary
Contemporary 1927 newspaper accounts — most notably a New York Times item rediscovered in recent years — list a “Fred Trump” among several men arrested after a violent Ku Klux Klan parade in Jamaica, Queens, and surviving contemporary clips in the Long Island Daily Press, the Brooklyn Daily Star (a defunct Brooklyn paper), and other local papers similarly record arrests and dismissals from that event [1] [2] [3]. Modern reporting has aggregated these primary-source clippings while also noting unresolved questions about identity and context, and about whether the arrestee was a Klan marcher, an incidental bystander, or misidentified [2] [3].
1. The New York Times — the clearest primary-source citation cited by later researchers
The New York Times published a contemporaneous account of the May 31/early June 1927 “free-for-all” between roughly 1,000 Klansmen and police in Jamaica, Queens, and that archived Times item names a “Fred Trump” with an address matching the family’s known Queens residence, listing him among those taken into custody [1] [2]. Modern writers and archivists (including BoingBoing’s 2015 reproduction) highlighted that Times clip as the keystone primary-source reference that first refocused public attention on the 1927 arrests [1] [2].
2. Long Island Daily Press and other local papers — corroborating local reportage
Local newspapers of the period reported the melee and the arrests in overlapping but not identical detail: a June 2, 1927 Long Island Daily Press item is cited as saying “seven of the berobed marchers” were arrested and notes names and dispositions, and the Queens County Evening News and other small papers published related arrest lists and court dispositions; Vice and PolitiFact identify those defunct local clippings as naming or associating a Fred Trump with the dispersal charge that was ultimately dismissed [3] [2]. These local clips are the primary sources researchers point to when they say multiple newspapers of the day listed a Fred Trump among arrestees [2] [3].
3. Brooklyn Daily Star / Brooklyn Daily Eagle references — context and variation
Accounts assembled by historians and journalists reference a Brooklyn Daily Star piece (a now-defunct local paper) that specifically reported a Fred Trump was “dismissed on a charge of refusing to disperse,” and Brooklyn Daily Eagle archival material supplies broader context for the May 30–31 parade disturbances across boroughs, even as reporting styles and lists of arrestees vary between outlets [2] [3]. Academic and journalistic follow-ups cite the Eagle and Star clips as part of the paper trail that multiple contemporaneous newspapers produced about the event [4] [2].
4. How modern outlets treated those primary sources and the persistent uncertainties
Contemporary fact-checkers and outlet investigations — PolitiFact, Snopes, Vice, The Independent and others — have reproduced or cited the 1927 Times clipping plus local press items and concluded that newspapers of the day did indeed list a Fred Trump among the arrested, while also emphasizing that the charge was dismissed and that the papers do not definitively establish membership in the Klan or Trump’s role in the clash [3] [1] [2] [5]. Reporting also records Donald Trump’s public denial of the arrest and notes ongoing disputes over identity and context that cannot be resolved solely from the newspaper clips [6] [7].
5. Limits of the record and what the primary sources do — and do not — prove
The primary-source newspapers named above — particularly the New York Times and contemporaneous local papers such as the Long Island Daily Press and the Brooklyn Daily Star (as reproduced and cited by modern researchers) — indisputably included a “Fred Trump” on arrest lists connected to the May 1927 Jamaica, Queens disturbances, and some clips specify he was dismissed without charge [1] [2] [3]. However, the surviving press clips do not, by themselves, establish motive, Klan membership, or whether the arrestee was the same Fred Trump later identified in census and family records; modern accounts note those evidentiary gaps and the resulting legitimate dispute about interpretation [2] [3] [8].