Ida Wells started as a journalist in 1894. She wrote for a newspaper called the Daily Inter-Ocean, a Republican newspaper in Chicago. This newspaper boldly and persistently denounced lynching.
Because women in the United States were voting by this time, Ida Wells also organized the Republican Women’s Club in 1894. Her efforts resulted in Lucy Flower being elected as a trustee for the University of Illinois. This was long before the 19th amendment was passed in 1920.
Although Ida Wells enjoyed expanding rights for women and for African-Americans in the 1890s and early 1900s, President Woodrow Wilson was determined to stop the Republican Party. In 1912, Wilson began taking away the civil rights which Blacks had enjoyed since 1863, as historian Dinesh D’Souza writes:
Segregation wasn’t limited to the South. Following his election, Woodrow Wilson mandated segregation for all the agencies of the federal government. This had never happened before. In a sense, Wilson was burying the ghost of Lincoln, who would have been appalled beyond measure. The black community was apoplectic. Black leaders like Ida B. Wells and Monroe Trotter Protested Wilson’s racism, but the Democratic president was unmoved.
African-Americans and Whites had worked side-by-side in integrated and desegregated federal agencies since the time of Abraham Lincoln. But Woodrow Wilson, fueling his Democratic and Progressivist movements, undermined civil rights in ways that the nation hadn’t seen in fifty years.
Monroe Trotter, a Black civil rights leader, called Wilson’s policies “preposterous,” and confronted President Wilson in November 1914 at a meeting in the White House. When Wilson dismissed Trotter’s concerns, W.E.B. DuBois remarked that President Wilson was “insulting and condescending.”
Wilson boldly argued for segregation, as Dinesh D’Souza reports:
Wilson indignantly told these black leaders that they had no reason to complain, because segregation was in fact beneficial to blacks. Wilson also echoed the argument from Plessy that segregation was just, since whites were being separated from blacks just as much as blacks were being separated from whites.
The outbreak of WW1 gave Wilson another opportunity for racist behavior. His administration dictated that, in the U.S. Army, African-American officers were segregated from White officers. Unlike President Theodore Roosevelt before him, or President Warren Harding after him, Woodrow Wilson stubbornly clung to racism throughout his administration.
