Commentary
By Frances Rice
President Woodrow Wilson
The light of truth is being shed, however slowly, on the racist past of the Democratic Party, even in the liberal media. Below is an article that was published by the editors of “The New York Times,” acknowledging the truth about their liberal icon, President Woodrow Wilson.
A video on the subject, “The Black-O-Scope Show: The Truth About Progressives,” can be viewed at: https://vimeo.com/144699370
My quest is to correct the history of civil rights, since liberals have systematically whitewashed the Democratic Party’s history of racism. A key component of this effort is the lawsuit against the Democratic Party.
For details, please view “The Black-O-Scope Show - Democratic Party Sued For Racism” at: https://vimeo.com/146717547
Perryman also wrote a book “Whites, Blacks and Racist Democrats: The Untold Story of Race & Politics Within the Democratic Party from 1792-2009.”
Notably, the 2006 report of the Commission appointed by the Governor of North Carolina prompted the Democratic Party of North Carolina to pass a unanimous resolution in 2007 apologizing for the Democratic Party’s role in the bloody 1898 Wilmington Race Riots where dozens of black Americans were massacred.
That apology can be viewed on the Internet at: http://www.history.ncdcr.gov/1898-wrrc/
In a letter to the North Carolina Democratic Party, North Carolina Lieutenant Governor Richard H. Moore wrote: “We can no longer ignore the fact that many of us grew up being taught a much sanitized – and inaccurate – history…. The truth is ugly.”
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NOV. 24, 2015
Student protesters at Princeton performed a valuable public service last week when they demanded that the administration acknowledge the toxic legacy of Woodrow Wilson, who served as university president and New Jersey governor before being elected to the White House. He was an unapologetic racist whose administration rolled back the gains that African-Americans achieved just after the Civil War, purged black workers from influential jobs and transformed the government into an instrument of white supremacy.
The protesters’ top goal — convincing the university to rename the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and the residential complex known as Wilson College — has drawn heavy fire from traditionalists. But the fact that racist policies enacted during Wilson’s presidency are still felt in the country today makes it imperative that the university’s board of trustees not be bound by the forces of the status quo.
Wilson, who took office in 1913, inherited a federal government that had been shaped during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when thousands of African-American men and women passed Civil Service examinations or received political appointments that landed them in well-paying, middle-class government jobs in which they sometimes supervised white workers. This was anathema to Wilson, who believed that black Americans were unworthy of full citizenship and admired the Ku Klux Klan for the role it had in terrorizing African-Americans to restrict their political power.
As the historian Eric Yellin shows in “Racism in the Nation’s Service,” Wilson stocked his government with segregationists who shared his point of view. The man he chose for the postal department, which had the most black employees nationally, had campaigned on the promise that the Democratic Party could be counted on to keep black people out of its own ranks and out of the government affairs of the Southern states. In this way, the administration set about segregating the work force, driving out highly placed black employees and shunting the rest into lower-paying jobs.
For John Abraham Davis, a black midlevel manager in the Government Printing Office with 30 years’ experience, the change came almost overnight. Just months after Wilson was sworn in, Davis was demoted to a succession of menial jobs and ended up as a messenger making half his original salary. As his grandson, Gordon Davis, wrote on the Op-Ed page on Tuesday: “By April 1914, the family farm was auctioned off. John Davis, a self-made black man of achievement and stature in his community at the turn of the 20th century, was, by the end of Wilson’s first term, a broken man. He died in 1928.”
The steady attrition of black white-collar workers like Davis from the federal work force went far deeper than the customary turnover when one party succeeds the other in government. It was a premeditated attempt to impoverish and disempower a small but growing class of black middle-class professionals. This subversion was not limited to Washington. In a few short years, Mr. Yellin writes, the Wilson administration had established federal discrimination as a national norm.
None of this mattered in 1948 when Princeton honored Wilson by giving his name to what is now called the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. Black Americans were still viewed as nonpersons in the eyes of the state, and even the most strident bigots were held up to public adulation. This is certainly not the case today.
The overwhelming weight of the evidence argues for rescinding the honor that the university bestowed decades ago on an unrepentant racist.
The overwhelming weight of the evidence argues for rescinding the honor that the university bestowed decades ago on an unrepentant racist.
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