Why did African Americans feel betrayed by President Wilson?
Answers
State power, government reform, and white supremacy combined to ensure that segregation meant more than separation: it meant that African Americans would be denied the social mobility progressives hoped to underwrite for white Americans.
“We must strip this thing of sentiment and look at the facts,” Wilson had demanded. These were facts that, in the eyes of the white majority, required the separation of African Americans not just from their neighborhoods but from the levers of American political and economic power.
African Americans resisted and protested against federal discrimination, but they could not overcome Wilsonians’ powerful belief that “good government” was “white government,” a belief that infused American politics with doubts about the legitimacy of black voters and politicians that persist today.