“Wilson promoted the Ku Klux Klan “
Not exactly.
Wilson screened ‘The Birth of a Nation’ in the White House at the urging of his old friend Thomas Dixon who wrote the book it’s based on. That’s about the extent of Wilson’s “promotion” of the KKK, which at the time the movie came out had been defunct for 40 years.
The movie itself was the world’s first major motion picture and the first blockbuster movie. The movie is what promoted the Klan, or at least Thomas Dixon’s idea of it, and it kicked off the second Klan era. Wilson played no role in that.
Woodrow Wilson-——
I am not on totally unassailable ground so you may be more accurate than I.
Not sure of the total accuracy but this is something to support what talk radio guy Bill Cunningham uses almost weekly when he lists the Byrd, LBJ and other white racists who are Dems....
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2015/11/20/9766896/woodrow-wilson-racist
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 himself was the descendant of Confederate soldiers, and identified deeply with the “Lost Cause” narrative, according to which the Confederacy was a government of noble men trying to preserve a decent agrarian way of life against crude Northern industrialists, rather than a separatist movement premised on white supremacy. ....
From Wilson’s book:
Elsewhere in the book, Wilson attacked Reconstruction on the grounds that “the dominance of an ignorant and inferior race was justly dreaded.” He was strongly against black suffrage: “It was a menace to society itself that the negroes should thus of a sudden be set free and left without tutelage or restraint.” He praised those freed slaves who “stayed very quietly by their old masters and gave no trouble” but bemoaned that they were the exception, the being “vagrants, looking for pleasure and gratuitous fortune” who inevitably “turned thieves or importunate beggars. The tasks of ordinary labor stood untouched; the idlers grew insolent; dangerous nights went anxiously by, for fear of riot and incendiary fire.”