Thomas Woodrow Wilson, a Progressive Democrat, was the 28th President of the United States, from 1913 to 1921. A Southerner, Wilson was said to be a vocal fan of the 1915 film The Birth of a Nation, which celebrated the rise of the first Ku Klux Klan. The film also helped popularize the second incarnation of the Ku Klux Klan, which gained its greatest power and influence in the mid-1920s. Wilson’s praise was used to defend the film from criticism by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). While President of Princeton University from 1902 to 1910, Wilson discouraged black people from applying for admission, preferring to keep the peace among white students rather than face an outcry if black students were admitted.
Wilson on Race
Quotation from Woodrow Wilson's History of the American People as reproduced in the 1915 film The Birth of a Nation.
Numerous black people voted for Democrat Woodrow Wilson in the 1912 election based on his promise to work for them. Yet as the first Southern-born president of the post-Civil War period, Wilson did not interfere with the well-established system of Jim Crow and instead acquiesced to the demands of Southern Democrats that their states be allowed to deal with issues of race, such as voting, without interference from Washington.
Black leaders who supported Wilson were angered when segregationist white Southerners took control of Congress and Wilson appointed many Southerners to his cabinet; Wilson and his cabinet members fired a large number of black Republican office holders in political-appointee positions, though they also appointed a few black Democrats to such posts.
Wilson’s Southern cabinet members pressed for segregated workplaces, even though federal offices had been integrated since 1863. Wilson ignored complaints when his cabinet officials established official segregation in many federal government departments, such as the post office, because of his own firm belief that racial segregation was in the best interests of black and white Americans alike. New facilities were designed to maintain this segregation, with U.S. Treasury Secretary William G. McAdoo defending the establishment of separate toilets in the Treasury and Interior Department buildings by saying, “I am not going to argue the justification of the separate toilets orders, beyond saying that it is difficult to disregard certain feelings and sentiments of white people in a matter of this sort.”
Wilson and William Trotter
On November 12, 1914, Wilson met with a group led by prominent civil rights leader William Monroe Trotter to discuss the continuing spread of segregation. In what became an acrimonious exchange in the Oval Office, Trotter listed examples of federal workplace segregation in several government buildings run by the Treasury Department, War Department, Interior Department, and others. Noting the backing he and other black leaders had provided Wilson in the 1912 election campaign, Trotter said, “Only two years ago you were heralded as perhaps the second Lincoln, and now the Afro-American leaders who supported you are hounded as false leaders and traitors to their race.” Questioning Wilson’s promises to aid black Americans with programs that included economic reforms, Trotter said, “Have you a ‘New Freedom’ for white Americans and a new slavery for your Afro-American fellow citizens? God forbid!”
Wilson countered that he considered workplace segregation a benefit to black people and that the aim was “not to put the Negro employees at a disadvantage [but] to make arrangements which would prevent any kind of friction between the white employees and the Negro employees.” Told by Trotter that black people considered workplace segregation to be a humiliation, Wilson responded, “If you think that you gentlemen, as an organization, and all other Negro citizens of this country, that you are being humiliated, you will believe it. If you take it as a humiliation, which it is not intended as, and sow the seed of that impression all over the country, why the consequence will be very serious.” Trotter continued with his claims that Wilson’s position about Jim Crow aiding black people was disingenuous and ended by saying, “We are sorely disappointed that you take the position that the separation itself is not wrong, is not injurious, is not rightly offensive to you.” An angered Wilson countered that the civil libertarian had insulted him, stating, “You have spoiled the whole cause for which you came,” before ending the meeting abruptly. In 1914, Wilson told The New York Times, "If the colored people made a mistake in voting for me, they ought to correct it."
William Monroe Trotter, 1915
William Monroe Trotter (1872–1934) was a prominent African-American civil rights activist as well as founder and editor of the independent African-American newspaper the Boston Guardian.
Despite Wilson's clear support for separation of the races, hardline segregationists, such as Georgia Congressman Thomas E. Watson, believed he did not go far enough in restricting black employment in the federal government.
The segregation that the Wilson administration had introduced into the federal workplace was maintained by succeeding presidents and not officially renounced until the Truman administration in the late 1940s.