William Keylor in City Journal: Wilson’s Racism
William Keylor, Professor of International Relations and History at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, said that the legacy of President Woodrow Wilson is tainted by his associations with racism.
Keylor was quoted making the argument in an Oct. 8 article in the news outlet City Paper entitled “A Tale of Two Dead White Males.” The article links Wilson’s place in the liberal pantheon to that of John C. Calhoun, an antebellum slave holder and namesake of a Yale residential college.
From the text of the article:
Historians acknowledge that Wilson’s record on race is deplorable. “Born in Virginia and raised in Georgia and South Carolina, Wilson was a loyal son of the old South who regretted the outcome of the Civil War,”according to Boston University Professor William Keylor. As president, Wilson inherited a federal civil service that had been integrated during Reconstruction, but he authorized the re-segregation of government departments. Wilson tried to prevent black soldiers from serving in combat roles during World War I, opposed Asian immigration on racial grounds, and openly sympathized with the Ku Klux Klan, even organizing a private White House screening of D.W. Griffiths’ notoriously pro-KKK film, Birth of a Nation.
You can read the entire article here.
Keylor served four consecutive terms as Chairman of the Department of History at Boston University (1988-2000) and been Director of the International History Institute since 1999. Learn more about him here.