If our public life is going to be all race all the time, with a view toward expunging all traces of racists from honored positions in American history, then Woodrow Wilson is a prime candidate for the memory hole. At InstaPundit, Randy Barnett sets out Wilson’s record as a racist in detail. Wilson re-segregated federal agencies that had been integrated during Reconstruction. W.E.B. DuBois called Wilson’s segregationist and discriminatory policies the “gravest attack on the liberties” of African Americans since Emancipation. Booker T. Washington visited D.C. during Wilson’s first term and reported, “I have never seen the colored people so discouraged and bitter as they are at the present time.”
Wilson was an unequivocal and outspoken supporter of segregation. “Segregation is not humiliating but a benefit, and ought to be so regarded by you gentlemen,” he told African-Americans.
In recent days, some have argued that the movie Gone With the Wind should be proscribed as racist. Then how about Birth of a Nation, which celebrated the rise of the Ku Klux Klan and depicted blacks as wanton rapists? That film, which Wilson admired, featured quotes from… (read the rest at PowerlineBlog.)
Photo credit Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library archives
