Woodrow Wilson
Born: December 28, 1856
Died: February 3, 1924
Term in Office: 1913-1921
When considering how the passage of time can change popular opinion of a person, look no further than Woodrow Wilson. Here you have a progressive Nobel Peace Prize winner, our wartime president during WWI. He was guy who helped ratify the 19th amendment, giving women the right to vote. He tried to pull countries of the postwar world together with his proposed League of Nations, a precursor to the U.N., the notion for which was squelched by our Congress.
BUT... (and it's a big one folks) ... he has been called a racist, and it appears the label is warranted. He allowed the desegregation of the federal workforce; a workforce that had been clicking along just fine as an integrated effort up to that time. He was the first man of the south elected to the high office since the Civil War, and his White House screening of D.W.Griffith's film Birth of a Nation – which gave a slanted history of the founding of the Ku Klux Klan – prompted protests from the African American community.
In fact, Griffith took quotes from Wilson for three of the title cards gracing his silent film, one of which stated, "The white men were roused by a mere instinct of self-preservation... until at last there had sprung into existence a great Ku Klux Klan, a veritable empire of the South, to protect the Southern country."
An article by Dylan Matthews on vox.com reports that "...Wilson was extremely racist, even by the standards of his time."
I was surprised to see an even-handed accounting of Wilson and his problems with race relations on the Woodrow Wilson House website.
Okay, just one more rogue to go... next, and last, up is Andrew Johnson. Fingers crossed that I can get that one out more quickly than this Woodrow guy.
Peace to all, and keep an open mind toward people who aren't like you.
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