As the Democratic nominee in 1912, Wilson had garnered the cautious support of many among the nation’s influential and politically diverse Black leadership. His New Freedom platform promising fairness and equality caught the attention of prominent African American activists including W.E.B. Du Bois, founder of the NAACP and publisher of The Crisis magazine, and William Monroe Trotter, a prominent and vocal activist and publisher of the civil rights newspaper, The Guardian.

Before long, however, Wilson’s policies and personal racism dashed the hopes of Du Bois, Trotter, and many other African Americans who had broken away from the Republican Party  -- or in Du Bois’s case the Socialist Party – to vote for the “progressive” Democrat. Wilson’s failure to address Jim Crow disenfranchisement, his decision to screen Birth of a Nation at the White House in 1915, his dismissal of African American activists, and – most notably – his administration’s active segregation of the federal government, together helped to further cement the systemic racial injustices that defined American life in the 20th century.

When Woodrow Wilson won the Presidency 1912, Washington, D.C. was home to a flourishing Black middle class with African Americans making up nearly a third of the city’s population. Still, racism and inequality plagued the nation’s capital, as it did the rest of the country, with neighborhoods, schools, and private institutions segregated across the city. The federal government, however, had been integrated in the early days of Reconstruction and continued to be so up to Wilson’s arrival at the White House. Making up at least 10% of the federal workforce, African Americans federal workers had the professional opportunities and resources to build a network of thriving, though segregated, educational and communal institutions in Washington, D.C. 

With the new Wilson administration, all that changed. 

As the first Southerner to ascend to the Presidency since before the Civil War, Wilson brought with him a segregationist ideology and sympathy for the “Lost Cause” narrative. With segregation laws becoming more entrenched across the South —and segregation in northern states bolstered by redlining—Wilson gave his newly appointed cabinet the permission to segregate their departments. As historian Eric Yellin explains, segregation did not simply separate Black and white workers in the federal government, it halted Black professional advancement and restricted hiring in the desirable positions for which these men and women were qualified having passed the requisite civil service exams. 

Though Wilson did not officially direct the implementation of these segregated policies, he welcomed them under the guise of the argument that it would reduce “friction” among government workers. But as William Monroe Trotter put it, just before Wilson kicked him out of the oval office for protesting these disgraceful policies, “We [had] appealed to you to undo this race segregation in accord with your duty as President and with your pre-election pledges to colored American voters. We stated that such segregation was a public humiliation and degradation, and entirely unmerited and far-reaching in its injurious effects. . . .”

When Wilson moved to the S Street House, he brought his love of modern entertainment with him. With little mobility in his final years, he inherited a film projector from a D.C. movie theater and had a large screen installed in his library where he took in the newest Hollywood films.

And yet, his love of film was also the center of one of the most prominent racist controversies of his presidency – the private screening at the White House in 1915 of the racist propaganda film, D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation.  The film, an adaptation of Thomas Dixon’s The Clansman, offered a wildly historically inaccurate tale about the Reconstruction Era that depicted the North and African Americans as aggressors and glorified the Ku Klux Klan [KKK] as the South’s righteous saviors or “redeemers.” Many have credited this narrative with fueling the resurgence of the Klan after WWI.  

After the screening, Wilson was quoted as having declared that the film was “like writing history with lightning. My only regret is that it is all so terribly true.” As a Ph.D. historian himself, Wilson’s words lent credence to this racist, false understanding of American history. 

Contemporary historians continue to debate whether Wilson actually uttered this now infamous line. They agree, however, that even if he was quoted inaccurately his own historical writings revealed that he shared the film’s harmful racist misreading of history. What is more, evidence suggests that despite the fact the quote had sparked anger and protest from the NAACP (est. 1909) and from many civil rights leaders, Wilson declined to disavow the words attributed to him. 

This story reveals the ways in which Wilson’s evident racism, which imbued his own bias as an historian—could manifest as much in his inaction as it did in his direct actions. Like with segregation of the federal government—which was largely orchestrated by his cabinet but with his explicit approval—permitting the screening of Birth of A Nation at the White House and refusing to deny the accuracy of the ‘lightening” quote showed how passivity and silence could speak volumes.

The film screening has persisted as a central controversy in Wilson’s legacy as revelatory of his racist ideals. At the same time, however, this moment was also central to the history of the civil rights movement as Black and white civil rights activists organized in protest of the film and in public condemnation of Wilson.  

Just two months after Wilson left office, his successor Warren G. Harding signed America’s most restrictive immigration bill to date – the 1921 Emergency Quota Act. Followed just 3 years later with the even more restrictive 1924 National Origins Quota Act (A.K.A. The Johnson-Reed Act), the American government for the first time set strict limits on the number of immigrants permitted into the United States. Seeking to not only limit the number of immigrants but also the racial and ethnic make-up of those hoping to start a new life in the United States, the quotas deliberately targeted migrants from Asia, Eastern and Southern Europe who nativists argued were ‘unfit’ and unassimilable.

The 1921 and 1924 Quota Acts were the culmination of decades of anti-immigration agitation and policy-making. And yet, while immigration was a central, contentious debate during the Progressive Era, the era’s defining President, Woodrow Wilson, is not remembered as a leader in immigration policy. As a Progressive Democrat, Wilson favored regulation and viewed it as necessary at a time when an unprecedented number of new arrivals. At the same time, the Democratic Party’s powerful political machines like Tammany Hall were largely dependent upon immigrant support, making support for restriction politically unwise. While Wilson did share the racist, White supremacist views of nativists, he was neither wholly opposed to immigration nor did he view all Eastern and Southern European immigrants as unassimilable or unfit for citizenship. 

Wilson’s approach to immigration policy was best captured in the multi-year battle over whether or not to institute a literacy test for incoming immigrants. 

In 1915, the Burnett Immigration Bill landed on Wilson’s desk for his signature. The Bill mandated that a literacy text be administered to new immigrants to root out those intellectually unfit for the rights and privileges of American citizenship. The bill also included a quota, a higher head tax on male immigrants, and a ban on immigrants who were single unskilled laborers. To those latter clauses Wilson did not object, but he viewed the literacy test as unjust, arguing that it  would deny entry to “illustrious [future] Americans [because] … those who come seeking opportunity are not [to be] admitted unless they have already had one of the chief opportunities they seek, the opportunity of education.” And so, Wilson vetoed the bill.

Two years later, a new restriction law, the Immigration Act of 1917, reintroduced the literacy test, along with an $8 head tax on immigrants and, most significantly, the establishment of the Asiatic Barred Zone blocking immigration from all of Asia except for the Philippines. Again, Wilson vetoed the bill declaring his opposition to the Literacy test. He did, however, voice his support for the Asiatic Barred Zone, showing his embrace of a racialized immigration system. 

The bill passed over his veto, setting the stage for the Emergency Quota Act of 1921.

Wilson’s attitude on immigration would shift again—though in uneven ways—during World War I. The controversial Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918, largely targeted German immigrants as well as Eastern and Southern European immigrants associated with anarchist, socialist, and pacifist movements. The targeting of immigrants was raised to a fever pitch during the First Red Scare of 1919 when thousands of immigrants, including the renowned anarchist and feminist, Emma Goldman, were deported.

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