Wilson was a disaster on several levels.
He was an absolute racist who did bring Jim Crow into federal employment.
The Democratic Party is and has always been the party of race discrimination and continues to be a party obsessed by race.
What’s curious is the difference between the old Bourbon Conservatives (long since extinct) and the Progressive Democrats. Bourbons like Grover Cleveland, while they may not have been at the forefront of improving the lot of Blacks, they didn’t deliberately stir the pot of racial hatred or pander to the worst elements.
Leftist Progressives, however, like Wilson and Sen. Ben Tillman of SC, these were the very worst sort. Tillman was a violent thug who used such methods to put down the burgeoning role of Blacks in state politics, and liberally employed the leftist class-warfare card to stir up poor Whites. Wilson may not have been a “thug” of that variety, but he was an intellectual type that had little use for Blacks. He was much closer to the similar “intellectualism” of types like Margaret Sanger, another Progressive leftist that simply wanted to halt the births of Blacks (and ethnic Whites) entirely until their existence ceased to be. Murder or abortion. Genocidal racism has always been the trademark of the left.
LBJ was the shrewd dem that saw an opportunity to unseverably tie blacks on the demoncrat party Plantation for the next 50 years with penny-ante handouts. No different than they have been treated forever in the Mother Land, Africa.