Like many other
progressives in the early 1900's,
Woodrow Wilson showed little interest in the plight of
African Americans. In fact, he shared many of the
racist attitudes prevalent at the time. Although Wilson denounced the
Ku Klux Klan's "
reign of terror", he sympathized with its motives to restore white rule in the postwar South and to relieve whites of the "ignorant and hostile" power of the
black vote. In his early years as a student of the prestigious
Princeton, Wilson had declared that "universal suffrage is the foundation of every evil in this country." He sharply opposed giving the vote to uneducated
whites, but he detested the
enfranchisement of
blacks, arguing that
Americans of
Anglo-Saxon origin would always resist domination by "an
ignorant and
inferior race." He believed that white resistance to black rule was "
unalterable".
Later, as a politician, Wilson courted black voters, but he rarely consulted African-American leaders and repeatedly avoided opportunities to associate with them in public. Many of the southerners he appointed to his cabinet were uncompromising racists who systematically began segregating the employees in their agencies, even though the agencies had been integrated for over fifty years. Workplaces were segregated by race, as were toilets, drinking fountains, and areas for work breaks. When black leaders protested these actions, Wilson replied that such racial segregation was intended to eliminate "the possibility of friction" in the federal workplace.
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