MAYBE THE ONLY GENUINELY RACIST PRESIDENT:

Let's be clear. Wilson was not just a personal racist, as in someone who had mean feelings against black people. As president, his white supremacist policies of segregation destroyed the lives of black professionals in the federal government. A powerful essay by Gordon J. Davis in the New York Times illustrates how Wilson's directives purged blacks from federal government jobs, including Davis's grandfather, who never recovered from the loss of income and became "a broken man" by the end of Wilson's first term. As Corey Robin notes in Salon, "if there's any erasing going on here, it's in the daily practices of Princeton. In those campus tours, those campus addresses, the general celebration of the man. Why haven't we heard criticism of how the past is being erased by Princeton's celebration of Wilson?"

Wilson is credited for helping found the League of Nations, the precursor to today's United Nations. But that Wilson's name is on Princeton's School of Public and International Affairs is a cruel irony, given that his legacy in the League of Nations has also been whitewashed. Wilson took his bigotry and pandering to Southern Democrats to the global stage when he opposed the Racial Equality Proposal put forth by Japan in 1919, that stated that a basic tenet of the League of Nations should be to accord "equal and just treatment . . . making no distinction, in law or in fact, on account of their race or nationality."

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