Administration of Woodrow Wilson

The presidency of Woodrow Wilson deepened the struggle of African Americans in the age of Jim Crow. The rights that Black Americans earned during the Civil War and Reconstruction Era had been under attack since the mid-1870s, and white supremacy began to find its way into southern state constitutions and federal law in the 1890s. By the time Wilson was inaugurated as the nation’s twenty-eighth president in March 1913, much of the structure of de jure Jim Crow was in place across the South. Yet Wilson was the first Democrat to inhabit the White House since Grover Cleveland left in 1897, and he was the first southern-born president since the Civil War. Wilson entered the White House carrying decades of patronage debts for the Democratic Party and the white South. His disregard for Black rights was apparent earlier in his life, such as in his academic publications and in his actions to keep Princeton University white during his tenure there. His presidential administration nationalized the Jim Crow regime by threading discrimination and segregation into the federal bureaucracy and the nation’s capital. When making presidential appointments, Wilson did not fight to overcome his party’s objections to appointing African Americans, even in minor positions long held by Black politicians in previous administrations. Instead, Black administrators disappeared from Washington, DC, ending not just their federal jobs but a national network of Black politicians and civil servants. Wilson’s white appointees leaned southern, and they quickly ensured that government policies and federal jobs would no longer protect or support Black Americans. Wilson did little of the “dirty work” personally, but he approved of the actions of his administrators. When pressed to defend the growing segregation and limitation of Black federal workers, Wilson deployed progressive reform arguments, declaring that “good government” required white leadership and the separation of white and Black public workers. During World War I, the Wilson administration ensured that Black soldiers were segregated into separate units and were generally denied critical roles in the war. Black soldiers showed great valor nonetheless, but they returned home to violence, discrimination, and no federal protections. Dozens of race riots across the country in 1919, including in the nation’s capital, underscored that prospects for Black Americans had indeed worsened under the Wilson Administration.