Wilson is often associated with the state of New Jersey because that’s where he served as governor and as president of Princeton University. But he was born in antebellum Virginia in 1856 and lived in Georgia during the Civil War. His parents supported the Confederacy, and Wilson’s five-volume history textbook, A History Of The American People, echoes those attitudes. The book adheres to what historians call the “Lost Cause” narrative, a non-factual view of history that romanticizes the Confederacy, describes the institution of slavery as a gentle patrician affair, recasts the Civil War as being about states’ rights instead of slavery and demonizes Reconstruction-era efforts to improve the lives of the formerly enslaved.
Wilson wrote that Reconstruction placed southern white men under “the intolerable burden of governments sustained by the votes of ignorant negroes,” and that those white men responded by forming the Ku Klux Klan. He described the Klan as “an ‘Invisible Empire of the South,’ bound together in loose organization to protect the southern country from some of the ugliest hazards of a time of revolution.”
White historians like Wilson helped popularize the Confederate Klansmen, who became the heroes of D.W. Griffith’s 1915 film The Birth of a Nation. The movie’s villains were Black Americans portrayed by white actors in blackface. Wilson agreed to screen the film—which quoted his own book in its title cards—at the White House.
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He screened the most racist movie of all time in the White House?
Wilson wrote that Reconstruction placed southern white men under “the intolerable burden of governments sustained by the votes of ignorant negroes,” and that those white men responded by forming the Ku Klux Klan. He described the Klan as “an ‘Invisible Empire of the South,’ bound together in loose organization to protect the southern country from some of the ugliest hazards of a time of revolution.”
White historians like Wilson helped popularize the Confederate Klansmen, who became the heroes of D.W. Griffith’s 1915 film The Birth of a Nation. The movie’s villains were Black Americans portrayed by white actors in blackface. Wilson agreed to screen the film—which quoted his own book in its title cards—at the White House.
How Woodrow Wilson Tried to Reverse Black American Progress
By promoting the Ku Klux Klan and overseeing segregation of the federal workforce, the 28th president helped erase gains African Americans had made since Reconstruction.
www.history.com
He screened the most racist movie of all time in the White House?
