A letter to the NAACP of Portsmouth, VA, by Robert Oliver:
There is a school in your area, called Woodrow Wilson High School, and that school has a majority black student population. Those black children live under oppression that you have chosen to ignore.
Many (Democrat, ergo progressive) Americans consider Woodrow Wilson to be one of the greatest presidents in U.S. history. Wilson is associated with progressives and with the League of Nations. However, there is a side of him that is not discussed in academia, and certainly not in the racially-charged time we live in today. So I have decided to present a few facts on Wilson for your consumption.
The Federal Highway Administration’s website reported:
“According to Wilson biographer Arthur S. Link, African-Americans strongly supported Wilson for President in the hope that he would treat them with compassion. In supporting Wilson, African-Americans had to overlook the fears raised by his Virginia birth. They also had to overlook the fact that as president of Princeton University he had prevented African-Americans from enrolling and that as a professor, university president, and Governor of New Jersey, he had never ‘lifted his voice in defense of the minority race,’ as Link put it.
“At one point, he released a statement to the National Colored Democratic League assuring the members that he opposed ‘unfair discriminating laws against any class or race’ and believed ‘that the qualifications for voting should be the same for all men.’ ”
And if that’s not bad enough, according to PBS:
“In 1912 Woodrow Wilson, the Democratic candidate for president, promised fairness and justice for blacks if elected. In a letter to a black church official, Wilson wrote, ‘Should I become President of the United States they may count upon me for absolute fair dealing for everything by which I could assist in advancing their interests of the race.’ “
“But after the election, Wilson changed his tune. He dismissed 15 out of 17 black supervisors who had been previously appointed to federal jobs, segregating their departments. Throughout the country, blacks were segregated or dismissed from federal positions.”
“In Georgia, the head of the Internal Revenue division fired all black employees: ‘There are no government positions for Negroes in the South. A Negro’s place is in the corn field.’ he said. The President’s wife, Ellen Wilson, was said to have had a hand in segregating employees in Washington, encouraging department chiefs to assign blacks separate working, eating, and toilet facilities. To justify segregation, officials publicized complaints by white women, who were thought to be threatened by black men’s sexuality and disease.”
Why did Wilson change?
Woodrow Wilson was not an advocate for civil rights as assumed or as inferred, but ACTIVELY practiced racial segregation in the federal government after his inauguration in 1913:
“Wilson’s historical reputation is that of a far-sighted progressive. That role has been assigned to him by historians based on his battle for the League of Nations, and the opposition he faced from isolationist Republicans…Domestically, however, Wilson was a racist retrograde, one who attempted to engineer the diminution of both justice and democracy for American blacks—who were enjoying little of either to begin with….”
“Upon taking power in Washington, Wilson and the many other Southerners he brought into his cabinet were disturbed at the way the federal government went about its own business. One legacy of post-Civil War Republican ascendancy was that Washington’s large black populace had access to federal jobs, and worked with whites in largely integrated circumstances. Wilson’s cabinet put an end to that, bringing Jim Crow to Washington.”
“Wilson allowed various officials to segregate the toilets, cafeterias, and work areas of their departments. One justification involved health: white government workers had to be protected from contagious diseases, especially venereal diseases, that racists imagined were being spread by blacks. In extreme cases, federal officials built separate structures to house black workers. Most black diplomats were replaced by whites; numerous black federal officials in the South were removed from their posts; the local Washington police force and fire department stopped hiring blacks. Wilson’s own view, as he expressed it to intimates, was that ‘federal segregation was an act of kindness.’ ”
Did Wilson love black people? No. He loved black votes.
