About a month has passed since members of Princeton University’s Black Justice League staged their 32-hour sit-in in the president’s office. The argument over whether to purge President Woodrow Wilson’s name from a Princeton dining hall, residential college, and public-policy school continues to pound the walkways of Princeton’s idyllic campus. It continues to heat up Princeton’s literary platforms: The Daily Princetonian published an editorial; the Black Justice League, an open letter. The debate continues off-campus among Princeton alumni, in their letters to newspaper editors and to Princeton’s Board of Trustees, which is forming a subcommittee to re-examine Wilson’s legacy and place on the campus.
The guardians of Wilson’s legacy have consistently acknowledged his racism but then listed his progressive achievements. Others have recoiled against his racism and called for his name to be removed from the campus. Still others have refused to engage in the naming debate. Hardly anyone has taken the time to seriously address the racist ideas of Professor Woodrow Wilson — the same ideas he used to defend his foreign and domestic racist policies — the same ideas that produced his affection for the Ku Klux Klan. We cannot neglect the role of his academic work.
“My chief interest is in politics, in history as it furnishes object-lessons for the present,” Wilson said before earning his doctorate in political science at the John Hopkins University, in 1886. And he sought to provide scholarly “object-lessons” not only for his peers, but also for general readers.
These general readers included college students. In 1889, Professor Wilson’s The State appeared, one of America’s first acclaimed political-science textbooks and a staple in classrooms until the 1920s. If not for John William Burgess, who established the Political Science Quarterly and then the first doctorate-granting political-science program at Columbia University, Wilson may have gone down as the disciplinary founder of American political science. Generations of aspiring government workers learned from Wilson about those “European and American governments,” which “constituted the order of social life for those stronger and nobler races which have made the most notable progress in civilization.” The governments of those “primitive” races “that are defeated or dead would aid only indirectly towards an understanding of those which are alive and triumphant, as the survived fittest.” Wilson went about promoting the old racist idea that rationalized Western imperialism abroad and white rule at home: White people in Europe and America had fashioned the world’s finest governing systems.
Professor Wilson moved to Princeton University in 1890. It was a crucial year in the history of racism — and not just because Mississippi Democrats’ new “understanding clause” set off the Southern rush of disenfranchising policies that would result in Wilson’s never having to associate with a single black congressman as president, from 1913 to 1921. When the 1890 census revealed that the black population was increasing at a substantially lower rate than the white population, racist Social Darwinists finally had their proof that freed black people, released from the nurturing care of their civilizing enslavers, were now losing the struggle for existence.
Enslavement “had done more for the negro in two hundred and fifty years than African freedom had done since the building of the pyramids,” Professor Wilson lectured at Johns Hopkins in 1890. His “object-lesson”? In the 1890s, the re-enslaving march of Jim Crow was racial progress.
In his 1892 book, Division and Reunion, 1829-1889, Professor Wilson blamed the North for the Civil War. His message: the Reconstruction era — when enfranchised black voters thrust their representatives into office — was the nadir of the American state. He hailed the destruction of the South’s interracial democracy by 1876. “Negro rule under unscrupulous adventurers had been finally put an end to in the South, and the natural inevitable ascendency of the whites, the responsible class, established.” That is why this Princeton professor had such an enduring affection for the Klan. These hooded knights had nobly brought about this ascendancy, as Professor Wilson chronicled in his most famous book in 1902, the five-volume A History of the American People. “The white men of the South were roused by a mere instinct of self-preservation to rid themselves … of the intolerable burden of governments sustained by the votes of ignorant negroes … until at last there had sprung into existence a great Ku Klux Klan, an ‘Invisible Empire of the South,’ … to protect the southern country.”
There is no getting around the fact that Wilson spent his professorial career at Princeton reproducing a history that honored the most murderous domestic terrorist group of his time — of maybe all American time.
To name is to honor. And to honor Wilson in a scholarly environment is to honor what he honored with his scholarship: the Ku Klux Klan. Also, to honor Wilson in a scholarly environment is to dishonor what he dishonored with his scholarship: interracial democracy.
Wilson’s racist legacy is more significant than his own segregating policies in the White House. He stood at the front of the choir defending America’s segregationist policies — policies that burned down the saplings of Southern democracy and equal opportunity that had grown since the Civil War.
The guardians of President Wilson typically shy away from putting Professor Wilson on the front line of this infamous choir. Their efforts to distance his ideology from the Klan seem as ardent as those of the apologists still trying to distance Thomas Jefferson’s body from Sally Hemings’s. The guardians bring up all the race-baiting of Jim Crow politicians, the scholarship of Columbia’s John William Burgess and William Archibald Dunning, the novels of Thomas Dixon Jr., and The Birth of a Nation, by D.W. Griffith. The guardians of President Wilson (and Princeton) are hardly forthcoming these days about Wilson’s racist scholarship, about the close Dixon-Wilson ideological and personal friendship, about Griffith’s silent film including Wilson’s quote about the “great Ku Klux Klan.”
Keeping Wilson’s name is not just about remembering, as some have argued. The effort to keep Wilson’s name is about forgetting. It is about forgetting Professor Wilson’s influential racist ideas. It is about forgetting that Woodrow Wilson stands in American history as one of the most influential enemies of people of African descent. Black people should not have to enroll or teach in a school, live in a college, or eat in a dining hall adorned by the name of their undeniable enemy.
Princeton’s trustees should remove Woodrow Wilson’s name from the school, the college, and the dining hall, and build a campus museum dedicated to and named after him. This museum would “publicly acknowledge the racist legacy of Woodrow Wilson,” as the Black Justice League sensibly suggests. This museum would not just showcase the full extent of his racism. It would also allow Wilson’s legacy “to be viewed in a more holistic light,” as those guardians of Wilson sensibly desire.
Racial debates about the past are simultaneously racial debates about the present. Those who excuse Wilson’s racism are almost certainly excusing America’s racism today. Those who expose Wilson’s racism are almost certainly exposing America’s racism today. This is the true significance of this debate. The outcome is an object lesson about how we think about racism today.
Ibram X. Kendi teaches African-American history at the University of Florida. His new book, Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, will be published by Nation Books in April.
