The influential pro–civil rights journalist Oswald Garrison Villard wrote that the Wilson administration 'has allied itself with the forces of reaction, and put itself on the side of every torturer, of every oppressor, of every perpetrator of racial injustice in the South or the North.' He further attacked it for its 'political stupidity': The administration 'has put into the hands of the Republican party an issue which, if they have the sense to use it, may be just the touchstone they are seeking.' Presidents Teddy Roosevelt and William Howard Taft had been much better about appointing black statesmen to public office, and other political figures, including whites, attacked Wilson's moves toward segregation.

It's worth stressing that Wilson's policies here were racist even for his time. DuBois, a vocal critic of Wilson's segregationist policies, pictured in 1950. Your manner offends me … Your tone, with its background of passion.' W.E.B. Wilson informed Trotter, 'Segregation is not humiliating, but a benefit, and ought to be so regarded by you gentlemen.' When Trotter insisted that 'it is untenable, in view of the established facts, to maintain that the segregation is simply to avoid race friction, for the simple reason that for fifty years white and colored clerks have been working together in peace and harmony and friendliness,' Wilson admonished him for his tone: 'If this organization is ever to have another hearing before me it must have another spokesman. In 1914, a group of black professionals led by newspaper editor and Harvard alumnus Monroe Trotter met with Wilson to protest the segregation. A Negro's place in the corn field.' To enable hiring discrimination going forward, in 1914 the federal government began requiring photographs on job applications. The head of the Internal Revenue division in Georgia fired all his black employees, saying, 'There are no government positions for Negroes in the South. After the Treasury and Post Office began segregating, many black workers were let go. Upon taking office, Wilson himself fired 15 out of 17 black supervisors in the federal service and replaced them with white people. DuBois - who had supported Wilson in the 1912 election before being disenchanted by his segregation policies - wrote of 'one colored clerk who could not actually be segregated on account of the nature of his work consequently had a cage built around him to separate him from his white companions of many years.' That's right: Black people who couldn't, logistically, be segregated were put in literal cages. The Department of Treasury and Post Office Department both introduced screened-off workspaces, separate lunchrooms, and separate bathrooms. Wilson offered no objection to Burleson's plan for segregation, saying that he 'wished the matter adjusted in a way to make the least friction.'īoth Burleson and Treasury Secretary William McAdoo took Wilson's comments as authorization to segregate. He took exception to the fact that workers shared glasses, towels, and washrooms. At an April 11, 1913, Cabinet meeting, Postmaster General Albert Burleson argued for segregating the Railway Mail Service. Apic/Getty ImagesĮasily the worst part of Wilson's record as president was his overseeing of the resegregation of multiple agencies of the federal government, which had been surprisingly integrated as a result of Reconstruction decades earlier. Woodrow Wilson resegregated the federal government Wilson and his Treasury secretary, William McAdoo, who led the charge by resegregating his department.

He was a racist by current standards, and he was a racist by the standards of the 1910s, a period widely acknowledged by historians as the 'nadir' of post–Civil War race relations in the United States. Leaving aside the broader question of whether Wilson's name should be removed, let's be clear on one thing: Woodrow Wilson was, in fact, a racist pig.

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