How the Black Middle Class Was Attacked by Woodrow Wilson’s Administration
/
How the Black Middle Class Was Attacked by Woodrow Wilson’s Administration
Update: In 2015 Princeton University examined the racial attitudes and presidential actions of US President Woodrow Wilson and his white supremacists cabinet. This article gives readers background on just how far President Wilson moved to undo black progress in the federal government.
Princeton took no formal action against Woodrow Wilson’s legacy in 2016, after student sit-ins in Nov. 2015, but to try and create a wider platform of conversation for dissenting views. That ambiguity ended this weekend, when Princeton University announced that it will remove Woodrow Wilson’s name from its public policy school and one of its residential colleges.
In a formal statement posted at Princeton University, The Board of Trustees concludes that Wilson’s racist views and policies make him an inappropriate namesake for the School of Public and International Affairs and residential college
##############
How the Black Middle Class Was Attacked by Woodrow Wilson’s Administration Updated Feb. 18, 2018
When Woodrow Wilson arrived in the nation’s capital in March 1913, he brought with him an administration loaded with white supremacists. Wilson’s lieutenants segregated offices, harassed black workers and removed black politicians from political appointments held by black men for more than a generation.
Racism had always been a part of life in Washington and its government buildings, but the U.S. civil service had never been formally segregated prior to Wilson’s inauguration.
More than a century later, Wilson’s racist legacy was called out by protesting students at Princeton University.
In response, in November 2015 the university agreed to examine the past of the former university president whose name graces both a residential college and a graduate school. In April 2016 the university’s trustees officially recommended that the buildings’ name not be changed but that Princeton make “an expanded and more vigorous commitment to diversity and inclusion” and that “the University also …be ‘honest and forthcoming about its history’ and transparent ‘in recognizing Wilson’s failings and shortcomings.’”
