Civil Rights icon Rep. John Lewis commented on President Trump’s remarks that countries like Haiti and those on the African continent are “shitholes.” In an appearance on CNN, Lewis said that it’s “frightening” that the president is “speaking the way that he’s speaking,” and that he will not attend his upcoming State of the Union address.

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Trump’s "words and his actions tend to speak like one who knows something about being a racist,” said Lewis. "It must be in his DNA, in his makeup.”

While Rep. Lewis was likely speaking figuratively in describing racism as being in Trump’s DNA, it does appear to run in Trump’s family. In 1927, newspapers reported that his father, Fred Trump, was arrested at a New York City Ku Klux Klan riot. The elder Trump was later sued for housing discrimination for refusing to rent to black tenants. Woody Guthrie even immortalized Fred Trump’s’ bigotry in song:

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

Gabrielle Bruney Gabrielle Bruney is a writer and editor for Esquire, where she focuses on politics and culture.

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