Woodrow Wilson’s anti-Blackness was astounding, both for our standards and even during the 1910s, when he was president. His legacy represents the core values of American white supremacy!
These are some of his most anti-Black moments.
Wilson was a son of Confederates, and he believed that the South should have seceded from the rest of the nation to maintain its way of life. The way of life being, of course, slavery. He wrote that Black people were an “ignorant and inferior race.”
During his presidency, he reinstated segregation within federal jobs, even ones already integrated. Many Black workers were laid off to maintain his policy. Some Black workers who couldn’t be segregated due to the nature of their jobs literally had cages built for them!
He was a KKK sympathizer. The KKK adored him so much that they quoted him three times within their white supremacist classic film, Birth of a Nation. Wilson even screened it at the White House, praised it, and suggested it should be educational material!
We live in the racist afterlife of his presidency, and we see his white supremacist ideology reflected in today’s politics. This country will never be safe for us until something entirely new can be created.