Woodrow Wilson was a white supremacist who lied to African Americans during his Presidential campaign in 1913. As is stated in one New York Times article, “Historians usually say, ‘Here was this amazing liberal progressive who was a racist, which is too bad, now let’s go back to talking about the good things'". Nor only that, but it is evident that Wilson’s racist actions were seen as extreme even for the time. 

Woodrow Wilson screened Birth of a Nation in the White House which glorified the KKK. According to a PBS article, "the film presented a distorted portrait of the South after the Civil War, glorifying the Ku Klux Klan and denigrating blacks”. 

As governor of New Jersey, he signed into law a sterilization bill fueled by his beliefs in eugenics. 

 During his time as president, he fired black supervisors like James Napier whose signature appeared on the dollar bill printed in 1912. Until President Woodrow Wilson took office in 1913, employment by the federal government was an engine of growth for the Black middle class in Washington, D.C.. As of 1907, there were 2,800 black federal workers in D.C.. These included over 400 black professionals and clerks.

Wilson required photos on all job applications as a mean of denying African Americans jobs. President Wilson’s racist Cabinet appointees oversaw demotion and firings of black workers, isolating them in “Negro corners,” forcing them to use “colored” toilets, and implementing “Whites Only” signs in federal buildings. 

Wilson was challenged by W.E.B DuBois and William Trotter of the newly formed NAACP and they were removed from the White House for “not knowing their place”. Wilson is quoted as saying to the New York Times, “if colored people made a mistake in voting for me, they ought to correct it". 

Wilson initiated the occupation of Haiti in 1915. He also intervened in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Mexico, and Russia. No other president invaded as many countries as this sworn promoter of self-determination.

Wilson blocked a Japanese proposal to include racial equality as a founding principal in the League of Nations. "At the bottom of all of this is the idea that certain people of color cannot be trusted and people of color do not deserve a place, not only on the world stage but also in our own communities," says professor Chris Suh who studies Asian American history. The rejection of the proposal would play a role in shaping the U.S.-Japan relationship, World War II, and Japanese American immigration. It sheds light on the treatment of nonwhite immigrant groups by the U.S. and its legacy of white supremacy. 

Wilson embraced the Chinese exclusion act. Literacy Tests and Asian exclusion were the hallmarks of the 1917 Immigration Act. The 1917 Immigration Act built on previous legislation, including the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the Gentlemen’s Agreement of 1907, an informal system for regulating immigration from Japan. Targeted exclusion, particularly of Asians, was based on racism and the false science of eugenics. 

President Woodrow Wilson was opposed to equal voting rights for women—until the suffragists boxed him politically. As a professor at Bryn Mawr College, he thought it was ridiculous to have to teach women; that it was beneath him. He also believed that suffrage was the root of all evil. Wilson believed that his political party would lose if they opposed women’s suffrage. It was a political decision on his part; not a moral epiphany.