What Woodrow Wilson Did to Robert Smalls

The twenty-eighth U.S. president was a white supremacist. We all know this, in the abstract. But here’s how he wielded his racism against one accomplished Black American

Aderson Bellegarde François. He is a professor of law and director of the Civil Rights Clinic at Georgetown University Law Center. Excerpt:

"As president, Wilson can rightfully be credited with a number of achievements. He was, in his day, and indeed even in the context of our times, a progressive. He was also a man born into a family that benefited from slave labor, whose theologian father preached that God commanded Black people to be slaves, and whose vast education never disabused him of the belief that Black people were his inferiors. That belief led him to visit incalculable pain and hardship on millions of people at home and abroad when, among other things, he had U.S. Marines occupy and establish a system of forced labor in Haiti that in effect reinstituted slavery in the very first Republic to have abolished it, back in 1803.

Smalls will never be as well-known as Wilson. In the hard calculus of affairs of state, perhaps Wilson counts more than Smalls. But on a human level, Smalls was a larger and better man than Wilson. We should be able to speak that plain fact without nostalgia, condescension, or defensiveness for the quite simple reason that the distance Wilson traveled from his privileged upbringing to the presidency of Princeton, to the governorship of New Jersey, and the presidency of the U.S. is objectively much shorter than that which Smalls traveled from being enslaved by his own father to fighting for the Union, to ratifying the Fourteenth Amendment, and representing the people of South Carolina in Congress.

In the end, it doesn’t matter terribly much whether Princeton removes Wilson’s name. He did destroy a generation of the Black middle class, and he did take away a freedom Haitians had fought a war of independence to earn. And yet, it should scarcely be surprising that an American university would choose to name a school of international affairs after one of its former presidents who, among other achievements, saw the country through World War I and was an intellectual architect of the precursor for the United Nations.

Smalls was 75 years old when Wilson, who probably never met the man and would have considered it beneath his dignity to be in the same room with him, reached down from the Oval Office and, with a small act that is not even granted a footnote in most surveys of Wilson’s legacy, capsized the last years of a Black man whose generation made America free. That’s as good a synopsis of the reality of white supremacy as one may get."