Remembering Woodrow Wilson's racism isn't enough: Column

Last week, students at Princeton called attention to the fact that one of their university’s famous graduates and leaders, Woodrow Wilson, was a racist. The appearance of Wilson’s name and image all over campus, they declared, reveals Princeton’s insufficient reckoning with his responsibility for the university’s racist past and present.

The students are right. They and college students across the country are indicting the institutional racism that makes even our most “enlightened” quarters hard places for people of color to live two generations after the fall of Jim Crow. They are calling the lie to America’s meritocratic promises, and their demands must be heard and acted upon.

But judging by the public response across a variety of platforms and political perspectives, their message might be getting lost.

From conservative commentators and liberal journalists have poured stories about Wilson’s racism. For liberals, Wilson’s racism stands as a reminder of the power of white supremacists in U.S. history. For conservatives, Wilson’s racism bears proof of the liberal president’s basic wrongheadedness. And Princeton’s leaders have begun to consider removing Wilson’s name from buildings and schools.

As the author of a book about the effects of Wilson’s racism on ordinary black men and women, I should be heartened by this focus on Wilson’s record. Instead, my thoughts turn to Swan Kendrick.

Kendrick never met Woodrow Wilson. He worked in Wilson’s government, but he was neither hired nor fired by the 28th U.S. president. When Wilson was elected in 1912, Kendrick was working as a clerk in the ordinance division of the War Department, earning the tidy sum of $900 a year. A Fisk University graduate, he had traveled from Mississippi for a better life in the nation’s capital. He was destined to succeed, he told his fiancée back home. Hard work, ability and savvy had won him pay and job protections better than the average American worker, and far better than most black workers.

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At a time when black Americans not only were denied access to social and economic mobility, but also literally were hunted and murdered for the cause of white supremacy, the federal government before Wilson was a remarkably equal opportunity employer. Kendrick and his cohort of 400 white-collar African American federal workers were exceptions in Jim Crow America. Thousands had come before them since the Civil War to take up work “in the nation’s service,” as Wilson famously implored Princeton graduates to do.

I think of Swan Kendrick whenever talk surfaces of Wilson because Kendrick’s story forces an accounting of American racism that is fuller and more complex then a focus on Wilson alone can produce.

In reality, it was not Wilson who passed Kendrick over for promotion again and again. Nor was it the president but an ordinary building guard who approached Kendrick in the bathroom one day in 1919 and told him he did not belong there. It was not Wilson who did the day-to-day work of segregating, harassing, dismissing and demoting black men and women in his government, work that ensured that the federal government would be a paragon of white supremacy for decades after Wilson left office.

Wilson approved of this discrimination, and he did his part in justifying it. But the racism that pervaded his government and his nation was the work of ordinary Americans, too. It was the result of a developing institutional racism and a long-standing racist culture that cannot be pinned on one “great man” alone.

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We should remember Swan Kendrick when we talk about Woodrow Wilson’s racism because we should spend more time thinking about the lives of people like Kendrick than Wilson’s loathsome support for D.W. Griffith’s racist fantasy film The Birth of a Nation.

Wilson indeed was a flawed and paradoxical figure. He was a racist and must be remembered as such. But consider how much easier it is to write columns about one man’s racism than it is to confront the fact that generations of hard-working Americans were told by their own government that their labor was not worthy because of the color of their skins. Consider how much easier it is to tear down a statue or rename a building than it is to address the economic and social oppression of the people who worked in (and probably built) that building.

The lessons we draw from the student activism at Princeton and across the country must not be about the actions of singular bad men only. They must force us to consider the broad and often quotidian effects of the inequality that pervades many of our national institutions.

Woodrow Wilson was a racist. But this mattered far less to Swan Kendrick than that his life’s prospects could be dimmed by the stroke of a supervisor’s pen.

History is so much more than the battle between mean racists and righteous anti-racists, and confronting it can only bring justice when we attend to its complexities, its grayer shades and its ordinary figures.

Eric S. Yellin is an associate professor of history at the University of Richmond and author ofRacism in the Nation’s Service: Government Workers and the Color Line in Woodrow Wilson’s America.

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