As president of Princeton University, he worked to keep Black students out, denying them admission. He also wrote a history textbook which defended the KKK and argued that African-Americans should not be allowed to vote.
Leaving the university and entering the field of electoral politics, Wilson mocked President Theodore Roosevelt, who had invited Booker T. Washington to dinner in the White House. Roosevelt’s meal was the first official invitation to a Black American to dine with a president.
After the meal, Woodrow Wilson used a hateful and inappropriate epithet to describe Roosevelt’s honored guest, even though Booker T. Washington was a leading Republican at the time.
Once elected president, Wilson set to work segregating federal workers. After the Civil War, federal employees had been desegregated and integrated: African-Americans and Whites working side-by-side as equals.
While Wilson was in the White House, a film titled The Birth of a Nation was released. Audiences in theaters saw, at the very beginning of the film, a quote in which Woodrow Wilson praised the KKK. The damage done by Wilson is described by historian Dinesh D’Souza:
Wilson also helped revive the Ku Klux Klan. Oddly enough this was the result of a single screening of a movie, David W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, which portrays the Ku Klux Klan as the savior of the South. Despite the crude technology of the time, the film is now recognized as a cinematic masterpiece. I regard it as one of the most powerful propaganda films ever made.
Wilson’s endorsement of the KKK, and of the movie, brought about a wave of intensified racist violence. Wilson’s Democrat Party, and his ‘progressive’ movement, did great damage to race relations in the United States.
