Wilson did not interfere with the well-established system of
Jim Crow and backed the demands of Southern Democrats that their states be left alone to deal with issues of race and black voting without interference from the North, ensuring there would be no challenge to the raft of laws passed to disenfranchise African Americans across the region.
[108]
While president of
Princeton University, Wilson discouraged blacks from even applying for admission, preferring to keep the peace among white students than have black students admitted.
[109]
Many black leaders supported Wilson in the 1912 election. However their rejoicing over Wilson's victory was short-lived as segregationist white Southerners took control of Congress and many executive departments.
[4] As President of the United States, Wilson ignored complaints that his cabinet officials had established official
segregation in most federal government offices, in some departments for the first time since 1863. New buildings and facilities were built to house black workers separately.
[110] "His administration imposed full racial segregation in Washington and hounded from office considerable numbers of black federal employees."
[111] Wilson and his cabinet members fired many black Republican office holders in political appointee positions, but also appointed a few black Democrats to such posts.
W. E. B. Du Bois, a leader of the
NAACP, campaigned for Wilson and in 1918 was offered an Army commission in charge of dealing with race relations; DuBois accepted, but he failed his Army physical and did not serve.
[112] Wilson drafted hundreds of thousands of blacks into the army, giving them equal pay with whites, but kept them in all-black units with white officers.
[113] When a delegation of blacks protested the discriminatory actions, Wilson told them "segregation is not a humiliation but a benefit, and ought to be so regarded by you gentlemen." In 1914, he told
The New York Times, "If the colored people made a mistake in voting for me, they ought to correct it."
[114]
Wilson was highly criticized by African Americans for his actions. He was also criticized by such hard-line segregationists as Georgia's
Thomas E. Watson, who believed Wilson did not go far enough in restricting black employment in the federal government. The segregation introduced into the federal workplace by the Wilson administration was kept in place by the succeeding presidents and not officially ended until the
Truman Administration.
[115]
Woodrow Wilson's "History of the American People" explained the
Ku Klux Klan of the late 1860s as the natural outgrowth of
Reconstruction, a lawless reaction to a lawless period. Wilson noted that the Klan "began to attempt by intimidation what they were not allowed to attempt by the ballot or by any ordered course of public action
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