Agencies that were desegregated after the Civil war were resegregated as one of Wilson's first actions -- all the way down to separate rest rooms and lunch rooms. Black managers were demoted or fired, even those with many years of service and no white could report to a black manager.
It was a major step backwards for black Americans. Wilson even went so far as to praise D.W. Griffiths film "Birth of a Nation" that re-wrote the ugly history of the Klu Klux Klan portraying them as southern patriots instead of what they really were, the terrorist wing of the Democrat party. (Rewriting history is nothing new for Hollywood.) After Wilson praised the film, it became the first major box-office "blockbuster" and because of it the Klan reemerged as a potent political force throughout the south and in a number of Northern and Midwestern states where large scale black migration from the south to work in northern factories caused racial tensions.
It was an ugly period in our history and Wilson rightly deserves much of the blame. Much of the torment we went through in the 50s and 60s, and even to this day regarding race relations can be traced to the Wilson administration.
And that is not even mentioning the unconstitutional Federal police powers Wilson spawned during WWI with mass arrests of and detention of so-called disruptive elements -- mostly people who opposed going to war in Europe. It made the Patriot Act of today look like a civil liberties picnic.
Do you have a resource (Internet or hardcopy) for the information you cited there?
Thanks for the info.
BTW, it is a smelly irony that most of the blacks now would support a party who has a history of supporting segregation.
It never ceases to amaze me how quickly we jump on the bandwagon when what we hear coincides with what we want to hear. But do we try to correct the record when we find something that doesn't go along with what we want to hear? No. As a black man, it is more damaging to me and how I percieve my fellow black men and women, when I read things like some of the posts here. Woodrow Wilson did NOT praise "Birth of a Nation". He only screened it in the White House, and the statement that he praised it was not made by him, but by Thomas Dixon, a classmate at Princeton. So that's one lie that needs to be corrected. "Birth of a Nation" was made in 1915. Think about that for a minute, and don't try to revise history by saying that just because anti-Black attitudes were common, that they were wrong. They've ALWAYS been wrong, but frankly, 100 years from now, the historians and sociologists will be saying a lot of things about now that don't go with how WE think of them. They had them then, because they were products of their times. Don't be a revisionist. Speak the truth, even if it is a negative one.
The second lie that needs to be corrected is that Wilson took some kind of action to create segregationist policies in the government. Try reading the Papers of Woodrow Wilson edited by Arthur Link to get the truth on that. There are dozens of letters and papers in those 69 volumes that show where Wilson tried to get Blacks appointed to Federal offices, Judgeships and other positions, but was *always* blocked by the Republican Senate. Wilson was NEVER responsible for Blacks being fired or losing their jobs. It was the management of Federal offices and departments who were doing that. There are several documented cases of Wilson intervening, only to be overriden by Congress. Again, this was a product of the times. We may not like it, but that's how it was.
I'm not entirely sure where this "racial attitudes in the 50s and 60s can be traced directly back to Wilson" comes from, because it simply isn't so. I have enough problems because of the color of my skin. I don't need some misguided and misinformed people making it worse, by playing a race card that is incorrect. There are plenty of racial injustices that we as Blacks have to deal with today, and sitting around complaining that it was bad 100 years ago does nothing to accomplish change today. The truth may well be negative, and it certainly may not be one that we like, but it is the truth. Try using it sometime. It increases credibility. I was the first person in my family to get a graduate degree, and only the second in my family to go to college. Please don't create issues, because you don't like some parts of the truth. History gets rewritten enough.