During Wilson’s presidency, he allowed his cabinet to segregate the Treasury, the Post Office, the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, the Navy, the Interior, the Marine Hospital, the War Department and the Government Printing Office. This meant creating separate offices, lunchrooms, bathrooms and other facilities for white and Black workers. It also meant dismissing Black supervisors, cutting off Black employees’ access to promotions and better-paying jobs and reserving those jobs for white people. When Wilson entered office in 1913, he was the first southerner to be president since Reconstruction. His cabinet included several white southerners, who “really had no idea how integrated the federal service was, how [relatively] unsegregated Washington, D.C. was," says Eric S. Yellin, a professor of history and American studies at the University of Richmond and author of Racism in the Nation's Service: Government Workers and the Color Line in Woodrow Wilson's America. "And when they arrive some of them are really in shock.”

Immediately, these cabinet members began to talk about segregating federal government employees by race. Wilson allowed his cabinet to do this despite protests by civil rights activists like W.E.B. Du Bois and William Monroe Trotter—whom Wilson angrily threw out of the Oval Office during a 1914 meeting in which Trotter made the case against segregation. A transcript of that meeting reveals that Wilson had argued, “Segregation is not humiliating, but a benefit, and ought to be so regarded by you gentlemen.”

When you consider that there are people still alive from the days when troops were segregated (which told black men that while they could fight and die for this country, they weren’t good enough to do it alongside white men, and at one point, nor be buried alongside them at Arlington), then you know just how deep the racism has run.