Woodrow Wilson and race

While Wilson's tenure is often noted for progressive achievement, his time in office was one of unprecedented regression in racial equality, with his presidency serving as the lowest point of the nadir of American race relations.

According to Wilson, his earliest memory was of playing in his front yard as a three year old, hearing a passerby announce with disgust that Abraham Lincoln had been elected president, and that a war was coming.

One of Wilson's books, History of the American People, includes such observations and was used as source material for The Birth of a Nation, a 1915 film that portrayed the Ku Klux Klan as a benevolent force.

The white men were roused by a mere instinct of self-preservation.....until at last there had sprung into existence a great Ku Klux Klan, a veritable empire of the South, to protect the southern country.

Wilson specifically criticized efforts to protect voting rights for African Americans and rulings by federal judges against state courts that refused to empanel black jurors.

According to Wilson, congressional leaders had acted out of idealism, displaying "blatant disregard of the child-like state of the Negro and natural order of life", thus endangering American democracy as a whole.

[16] Though most accounts agree Wilson respected Washington, he would not allow him to be housed on campus with a member of the faculty; such arrangements had been made for all of the white guests coming from out of town to attend the ceremony.

Most African Americans able to receive higher education did so at HBCUs such as Howard University, but by the early 1900s, virtually all Ivy League schools had begun admitting small numbers of black students.

[22] During the eight years that Wilson served as president of Princeton from 1902 to 1910, his perspective on race does not appear to have evolved; campus facilities remained segregated, and no African Americans were hired as faculty or admitted as undergraduate students during his tenure.

Wilson never expressly renounced his prior views on segregation and race relations, but many took his words and actions – such as receiving black leaders at his home on multiple occasions – as showing that he was a changed man.

A seasoned political voice within the African American community, Du Bois was a co-founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), in addition to being the editor and chief of the organization's newspaper, The Crisis, which he used to attract Negro support to Wilson.

Du Bois certainly believed as much to be the case, saying so in a letter he wrote to Wilson after he won the election, and stating that all he and his people desired in return for the overwhelming support they gave him was to safeguard their basic civil and human rights.

[4][59] Since the end of Reconstruction, the federal bureaucracy had been possibly the only career path where African Americans "witnessed some level of equity"[60] and it was also the life blood and foundation of the black middle class.

Booker T. Washington, who visited the capital to investigate claims that African Americans had been virtually shut out of the city's bureaucracy, described the situation: "(I) had never seen the colored people so discouraged and bitter as they are at the present time.

It had been deliberately dispersed throughout several camps during its stateside training; some of its artillery units were summoned to France before they had completed their courses of instruction, and were never fully equipped until after the Armistice; nearly all its senior white officers scorned the men under their command and repeatedly asked to be transferred.

Pershing staunchly resisted these attempts, in large part due to apparent willingness of Allied commanders to sacrifice the lives of their own soldiers, resulting in tremendously high casualties.

[83][84] After America's entry into World War I, the presence and even movement of black soldiers through the segregated south sparked racial tension that at times erupted into violence,[85] the most notable such incident being the Houston riot of 1917.

[92][93] Following Wilson's appointment of Josephus Daniels as Secretary of the Navy in 1913, a system of Jim Crow was swiftly implemented; with ships, training facilities, restrooms, and cafeterias all becoming segregated.

In response, but only after much public outcry and pressure, Wilson asked Attorney General Thomas Watt Gregory if the federal government could intervene to "check these disgraceful outrages".

The underlying causes of the race riots of the late 1910s vary in specifics but are largely attributable to local labor and economic unrest, an area Wilson is usually considered to have been highly responsive towards.

[101] In all of these incidents, though the federal government failed to take corrective action, state and local authorities regularly exhibited clear malice towards the victimized black communities.

Several major race riots, including the Tulsa massacre, took place after Wilson left office and in spite of the Republican Harding administration's much firmer stance in support of the rights of African Americans.

[103][104][105] Wilson was incapacitated by a stroke he suffered in late 1919 and for most of the next year his staff and cabinet acted without direction from the president and avoided taking decisive action or changes to policy.

Despite his record of inaction, it is arguably a stretch to hold Wilson accountable for the spike in racial violence during this time considering his mental state and the still limited role expected of the presidency when it came to matters of local unrest.

According to Naoko Shimazu, "Wilson perceived a great risk to the future of the League, should the racial equality issue become unmanageable by creating divisions in the plenary session.

[131] Later on, after Wilson became president, his speeches revealed appreciation for the contributions of all European immigrants had made to the United States, as well as his belief that their arrival had invigorated American democracy and freedom.

[139][140][141] On a personal level, McReynolds was widely seen by his peers as a mean-spirited bigot, whose disrespect was so extreme he was known to at times turn his chair around to face the wall when prominent African-American attorneys addressed the court during oral arguments.

Since many historians consider Wilson's time in office to be within the decades-long nadir of American race relations, disagreement exists as to his exact role in perpetrating racial discrimination.

[157] Steps towards a desegregated military did not commence until the late 1940s under Harry Truman,[158] and the Wilsonian policy of barring black servicemen from combat remained mostly in place through World War II.

[159] Though African American employment in the federal government rebounded under Herbert Hoover,[160] segregation of workspaces and "whites only" hiring did not begin to see serious reversal until the administration of John F. Kennedy in the early 1960s.