Wilson was a Fascist, and considered himself a Southerner all his life. Also awhile supremacist.
A Rat hero Woodrow Wilson!
Wilson took office in 1913:
Washington was a rigidly segregated town—except for federal government agencies. They had been integrated during the post-war Reconstruction period, enabling African Americans to obtain federal jobs and work side by side with whites in government agencies. Wilson promptly authorized members of his cabinet to reverse this long-standing policy of racial integration in the federal civil service.
Upon taking office, Wilson himself fired 15 out of 17 black supervisors in the federal service and replaced them with white people.
To enable hiring discrimination going forward, in 1914 the federal government began requiring photographs on job applications.
At the Versailles Convention in 1919, Wilson helped kill a proposal from Japan calling for the treaty to recognize the principle of racial equality. While 11 out of 17 members at the meeting considering the amendment favored it, Wilson, who was presiding, arbitrarily decided that the amendment had been defeated because the vote wasn’t unanimous.
Historian Wesley Moody describes Wilson’s most famous book as an academic, A History of the American People, as “steeped in Lost Cause mythology.” The book was generally sympathetic to the Ku Klux Klan, describing them as “men half outlawed, denied the suffrage, without hope of justice in the courts, who meant to take this means to make their will felt.” (”This means” being violence and intimidation against black people.)
Wilson quotes from D.W.Griffth’s film “Birth of a Nation”.
The “Birth of a Nation” actually cut off the most racist part of the first half of the quote:
The white men of the South were aroused by the mere instinct of self-preservation to rid themselves, by fair means or foul, of the intolerable burden of governments sustained by the votes of ignorant negroes and conducted in the interest of adventurers.
And that was only the last of three Wilson quote title cards in the film. This one came first:
Adventurers swarmed out of the North, as much the enemies of one race as of the other, to cozen, beguile, and use the Negroes.…In the villages the Negroes were the office holders, men who knew none of the uses of authority, except its insolences.
And then this one:
The Policy of the congressional leaders wrought…a veritable overthrow of civilization in the South.…in their determination to “put the white South under the heel of the black South.”
Wilson was born in Virginia and lived there as a kid but moved to New Jersey when he was still young. Southerners do not claim him. He’s much more a product of New Jersey. That’s where his formative years were spent.