The Westside Gazette

An Open Letter to Rev. Jesse Jackson, Rev. Al Sharpton, and Congresswoman Maxine Waters Regarding Racist White Presidents

By Robert Oliver

Rev. Jackson, the following is from a recent news article: “Jesse Jackson says Trump would probably have been ‘with the stormtroopers’ on ‘Bloody Sunday’ in Selma”:

“Famed civil rights activist Jesse Jackson, here to commemorate the 1965 voting rights march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, said he believes President Trump would probably have been on the side of the ‘storm troopers’ who beat protesters in what has gone down in history as ‘Bloody Sunday.’

“Yahoo News asked Jackson what he thought Trump ‘would have been doing’ if he was in Selma at the time.

‘Probably with the storm troopers,’ Jackson said.” — https://news.yahoo.com/jesse-jackson-says-trump-stormtroopers-bloody-sunday-selma-165302024.html

Rev, please read “FLASHBACK: Jesse Jackson Praises Donald Trump for ‘Lifetime of Service’ to Blacks”: “With all the talk about how ‘racist’ Donald Trump is, this is a pretty funny reminder of the way Black leaders USED to talk about the man who is now President of the United States.  An old video has recently emerged that has none other than Jesse Jackson praising Trump…Jesse Jackson, of course, is someone the left considers having impeccable ‘racial’ credentials.  So, what will they do with this video? Probably ignore it… But conservatives won’t let them get off that easy.” — https://www.patheos.com/blogs/accesspolitics/2018/01/flashback-jesse-jackson-praises-donald-trump-lifetime-service-blacks/  (Click this link.)

As I said before, Donald Trump is your friend. Everyone knows that fact. People know you never became close friends with racists. But I digress.

Rev. Jackson, you wrote in 2018: “Democrats have no choice but to stand strong against the rollback of civil rights and the stoking of racial fears that have become the signature of Trump’s presidency.” — https://chicago.suntimes.com/columnists/n-word-trump-racism-omarosa/

Donald Trump donated space to you at 40 Wall Street in New York City for your Wall Street Project, remember? You said, “When we opened this Wall Street project . . . He gave us space at 40 Wall Street, which was to make a statement about our having a presence there”: “Jesse Jackson once sang Donald Trump’s praises”

https://nypost.com/2016/08/31/jesse-jackson-once-sang-donald-trumps-praises/

Rev. Sharpton, you said: “I think that Trump represents a backlash of the eight years of President Obama and has given every dog whistle or racial signal to the worst elements in American society.” — https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/trump-al-sharpton-us-far-right-civil-rights-obama-white-house-a8386556.html

Trump gave your organization thousands of dollars. Did you refund him his money? “Trump Donated Thousands, Had Close Working Relationship with Al Sharpton” — https://www.mediaite.com/tv/trump-donated-thousands-had-close-working-relationship-with-al-sharpton/

Congresswoman Waters, you said: “For these members of his cabinet who remain and try to defend him they’re not going to be able to go to a restaurant, they’re not going to be able to stop at a gas station, they’re not going to be able to shop at a department store, the people are going to turn on them, they’re going to protest, they’re going to absolutely harass them until they decide that they’re going to tell the president ‘no I can’t hang with you, this is wrong this is unconscionable and we can’t keep doing this to children.’ — https://www.christianpost.com/news/maxine-waters-harass-trump-officials-public-places-god-is-on-our-side-democrat-congresswoman-rally.html

During the Civil Rights Era, did Dr. Martin Luther King, A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin, etc. use such language to “harass” members of the previous presidential administrations, Democrat or Republican? These civil rights leaders were class acts, weren’t they?

How things have changed, haven’t they?

Also “Rep. Maxine Waters (D., Calif.) on Friday accused Harvard Law School professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz of being ‘racist’ for saying that the Trump administration will be facing an ‘unfavorable’ locality for a grand jury because it is ‘solidly Democratic’ and  has a ‘ethnic and racial composition’ not favorable to Trump.” — “Maxine Waters Accuses Democratic Law School Professor of Being a ‘Racist’ in Defense of Trump https://freebeacon.com/politics/waters-accuses-dershowitz-racist/

Alan Dershowitz is a liberal Democrat who supported Bill Clinton, remember? He is no “racist Republican.”

Is it not time for all of you to sweep around your own front doors before you sweep around the White House’s?

Shouldn’t you three be very disappointed that President Donald Trump is not as racist as your progressive Democratic president Woodrow Wilson was?

Is it not time to tell Black people the truth?

Would revealing the truth bring out some uncomfortable facts about your progressive president Woodrow Wilson? Uncomfortable facts that your white liberal Democratic leadership does not really want black Americans to know about?

My cup runneth over.

As Barack Obama famously said: “Sunlight is the best disinfectant.”

Was not President Woodrow Wilson a progressive Democrat as you all are? Today, is he not considered one of the greatest presidents in U.S. history?  Many Black Americans are under the impression that President Wilson was a fighter for civil rights because he was a Democrat. After all, Democrats.org says: “For more than 200 years, (even during slavery — my edit) our party has led the fight for civil rights, health care, Social Security, workers’ rights, and women’s rights.”

However, Democrats.org very carefully obscures that your progressive Democratic president Wilson was an open racist, an open white supremacist, and an open segregationist. Some may ask, “A racist and a segregationist? How can that be??? Democrats say they have always fought for civil rights for African Americans in their 200-year history, especially before the Civil War! Wilson was a hero! Those Republicans are up to their old tricks again trying to smear a great civil rights icon such as Woodrow Wilson! You can’t trust those crackers!”

Well, can we look at the facts carefully and logically?

The Federal Highway Administration’s website (http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/highwayhistory/road/s09.cfm) reported:

“According to Wilson biographer Arthur S. Link, African Americans strongly supported Wilson for President in the hope that he would treat them with compassion. In supporting Wilson, African Americans had to overlook the fears raised by his Virginia birth. They also had to overlook the fact that as president of Princeton University he had prevented African Americans from enrolling and that as a professor, university president, and Governor of New Jersey, he had never ‘lifted his voice in defense of the minority race,’ as Link put it.

(Up with “hope”?)

“At one point, he released a statement to the National Colored Democratic League assuring the members that he opposed ‘unfair discriminating laws against any class or race’ and believed ‘that the qualifications for voting should be the same for all men.’”

However, PBS.org sheds more light:

“In 1912 Woodrow Wilson, the Democratic candidate for president, promised fairness and justice for Blacks if elected. In a letter to a Black church official, Wilson wrote, ‘Should I become President of the United States they may count upon me for absolute fair dealing for everything by which I could assist in advancing their interests of the race.’ But after the election, Wilson changed his tune. He dismissed 15 out of 17 Black supervisors who had been previously appointed to federal jobs segregating their departments. Throughout the country, Blacks were segregated or dismissed from federal positions. In Georgia, the head of the Internal Revenue division fired all Black employees: ‘There are no government positions for Negroes in the South. A Negro’s place in the corn field.’ he said. The President’s wife, Ellen Wilson, was said to have had a hand in segregating employees in Washington, encouraging department chiefs to assign Blacks separate working, eating, and toilet facilities. To justify segregation, officials publicized complaints by white women, who were thought to be threatened by Black men’s sexuality and disease.”

Your progressive Democrat Woodrow Wilson who promised fairness for Blacks changed his tune?  Was he racist like Donald Trump?

Therefore, progressive Democratic president Woodrow Wilson was not an advocate for civil rights as assumed or as inferred, but actively practiced racial segregation in the federal government after his inauguration in 1913:

“Wilson’s historical reputation is that of a far-sighted progressive. That role has been assigned to him by historians based on his battle for the League of Nations, and the opposition he faced from isolationist Republicans…Domestically, however, Wilson was a racist retrograde, one who attempted to engineer the diminution of both justice and democracy for American Blacks—who were enjoying little of either to begin with….

“Upon taking power in Washington, Wilson and the many other Southerners he brought into his cabinet were disturbed at the way the federal government went about its own business. One legacy of post-Civil War Republican ascendancy was that Washington’s large Black populace had access to federal jobs and worked with whites in largely integrated circumstances. Wilson’s cabinet put an end to that, bringing Jim Crow to Washington.

“Wilson allowed various officials to segregate the toilets, cafeterias, and work areas of their departments. One justification involved health: White government workers had to be protected from contagious diseases, especially venereal diseases, that racists imagined were being spread by Blacks. In extreme cases, federal officials built separate structures to house Black workers. Most Black diplomats were replaced by whites; numerous Black federal officials in the South were removed from their posts; the local Washington police force and fire department stopped hiring Blacks. Wilson’s own view, as he expressed it to intimates, was that federal segregation was an act of kindness.’” — http://reason.com/blog/2009/11/30/woodrow-wilsons-legacy .

Did your progressive President Wilson love Black people?

No. Black votes were better looking to him than Black people were.

Period.

The website of the Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library (http://www.woodrowwilson.org/1916-election/131--peoples-experience-african-americans) reports:

“Wilson permitted segregation in federal offices soon after becoming president, treating it, he said, not as an instrument of humiliation, but to ease racial tensions. W.E.B. Dubois and likeminded thinkers disagreed heartily with Wilson’s choice, petitioning repeatedly for the suspension of the practice. Wilson refused.”

Your President Wilson refused to suspend segregation.

Period.

The April 1959 issue of the “Journal of Negro History” stated:

“When Woodrow Wilson assumed the presidency in 1913 many Negroes believed that he would champion their cause for advancement. An unprecedented number of Negroes had cast their vote for Wilson, ridicule from others of their race for so departing from the ranks of the Republican Party. This deviation from the traditional line of Negro support was nurtured by discontent with the Republican and Progressive candidates, Taft and (Theodore) Roosevelt, and their platforms. It was spurred by the stirring assurances of wholehearted support to the Negro race by Woodrow Wilson.

“Yet it was in Woodrow Wilson’s administration that the most bitter blow to Negro hopes of advancement fell.”

Period.

To repeat, when he was president of Princeton University, Wilson barred Blacks from admission. Yet did not many Blacks vote for him anyway, against their own self-interests?

Why? In a society where in many places’ segregation, discrimination and Jim Crow were legal, did Black people had hope (that word again) that things were going to change?

NAACP officer W.E.B. Du Bois, also Editor of the NAACP publication “The Crisis,” expressed hopes in Wilson. He wrote to President Wilson in March 1913:

“Sir: Your inauguration to the Presidency of the United States is to the colored people, to the white South and to the nation a momentous occasion. For the first time since the emancipation of slaves the government of this nation — the Presidency, the Senate, the House of Representatives — passes on the 4th of March into the hands of the party which a half century ago fought desperately to keep Black men as real estate in the eyes of the law.

“Your elevation to the chief magistracy of the nation at this time shows not simply a splendid national faith in the perpetuity of free government in this land, but even more, a personal faith in you.

“We Black men by our votes helped to put you in your high position. It is true that in your overwhelming triumph at the polls that you might have succeeded without our aid, but the fact remains that our votes helped elect you this time, and that the time may easily come in the near future when without our 500,000 ballots neither you nor your party can control the government.

“True as this is, we would not be misunderstood. We do not ask or expect special consideration or treatment in return for our franchises. We did not vote for you and your party because you represented our best judgment. It was not because we loved Democrats more, but Republicans less and Roosevelt least, that led to our action… We want to be treated as men. We want to vote. We want our children educated. We want lynching stopped. We want no longer to be herded as cattle on street cars and railroads. We want the right to earn a living, to own our own property and to spend our income unhindered and uncursed. Your power is limited? We know that, but the power of the American people is unlimited. Today you embody that power, you typify its ideals. In the name then of that common country for which your fathers and ours have bled and toiled, be not untrue, President Wilson, to the highest ideals of American Democracy.” — http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/open-letter-to-woodrow-wilson/

However, just six months after Wilson’s inauguration, Du Bois wrote Wilson:

“Sir, you have now been President of the United States for six months and what is the result? It is no exaggeration to say that every enemy of the Negro race is greatly encouraged; that every man who dreams of making the Negro race a group of menials and pariahs is alert and hopeful. Vardaman, Tillman, Hoke Smith, Cole Blease, and Burleson are evidently assuming that their theory of the place and destiny of the Negro race is the theory of your administration, They and others are assuming this because not a single act and not a single word of yours since election has given anyone reason to infer that that you have the slightest interest in the colored people or desire to alleviate their intolerable position… To this negative appearance of indifference has been added positive action on the part of your advisers, with or without your knowledge, which constitutes the gravest attack on the liberties of our people since emancipation, public segregation of civil servants in government employ, necessarily involving personal insult and humiliation, has for the first time in history been made the policy of the United States government.

“In the Treasury and Post Office Departments colored clerks have been herded to themselves as though they were not human beings. We are told that one colored clerk who could not actually be segregated on account of the nature of his work has consequently had a cage built around him to separate him from his white companions of many years. Mr. Wilson, do you know these things? Are you responsible for them? Did you advise them? Do you not know that no other group of American citizens has ever been treated in this way and that no President of the United States ever dared to propose such treatment? Here is a plain, flat, disgraceful spitting in the face of people whose darkened countenances are already dark with the slime of insult. Do you consent to this, President Wilson? Do you believe in it? Have you been able to persuade yourself that national insult is best for a people struggling into self-respect?” — http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/another-open-letter-to-woodrow-wilson/

Did Du Bois and the entire American Black voting population at the time get “voter’s remorse”?  Does it seem possible that they all thought “What have we done?” Do you feel it must have pained Du Bois to think about what he wrote to Wilson?  He wrote: “We black men by our votes helped to put you in your high position.” Did Du Bois have mental anguish in thinking that he helped to bring more misery to his own people by supporting Wilson?

Paula Span on History.net wrote: “Black leaders subsequently declined to support [Wilson’s] reelection. ‘We need scarcely to say that you have grievously disappointed us,’ Du Bois wrote.

“By any reasonable standards anyone would apply today, I think it’s fair to say Woodrow Wilson was a racist,” (University of Wisconsin historian John Milton Cooper, author of several Wilson biographies) Cooper acknowledges, regretfully.” — https://www.historynet.com/woodrow-wilson

In 1956, Du Bois admitted:

“In 1912 I wanted to support Theodore Roosevelt, but his Bull Moose convention dodged the Negro problem and I tried to help elect Wilson as a liberal Southerner. Under Wilson came the worst attempt at Jim Crow legislation and discrimination in civil service that we had experienced since the Civil War.” (http://blackagendareport.com/content/why-i-wont-vote-1956)

Black educator Booker T. Washington said of his visit to Washington, D.C. in the summer of 1913, just a few months after Wilson’s inauguration: “I have never seen the colored people so discouraged and bitter as they are at the present time.” — https://www.creators.com/read/walter-williams/02/16/clinton-and-sanders-and-progressivism

Discouraged? Bitter?

Rev. Jackson, Rev. Sharpton, and Congresswoman Waters, why were they bitter? Could it be that Wilson promised before his election “I want to assure them through you that should I become President of the United States, they may count upon me for absolute fair dealing and for everything by which I could assist in advancing the interests of their race in the United States”?

I understand there was a Wilson campaign slogan: “He Kept Us Out of War!” I wonder if many Black Americans at that time said: “He Kept Us Out–Period!”

Well, you know better when politicians make promises.

Were Du Bois and the rest of the Black voters who voted for Wilson bamboozled and hoodwinked? Did they discover that they were worse off under Wilson than under any other previous president?  Who is the racist president here compared to today?

But why is your white supremacist and racist Woodrow Wilson still considering a beloved icon by those who claim to eschew white supremacy and racism?

According to the U.S. history book Land of Promise:

“Woodrow Wilson’s administration was openly hostile to Black people. Wilson was an outspoken white supremacist who believed that Black people were inferior. During his campaign for the presidency, Wilson promised to press for civil rights. But once in office he forgot his promises. Instead, Wilson ordered that white and Black workers in federal government jobs be segregated from one another. This was the first time such segregation had existed since Reconstruction! When black federal employees in Southern cities protested the order, Wilson had the protesters fired. In November 1914, a Black delegation asked the President to reverse his policies. Wilson was rude and hostile and refused their demands.”

Therefore, Woodrow Wilson, a born Southerner from Virginia whose immediate family owned slaves, was as much as a white supremacist as John Wilkes Booth who said “That means nigger citizenship” when President Abraham Lincoln, on the evening of April 11, 1865, expressed a desire to give Blacks the right to vote.

Booth and Wilson considered Black people inferior. Why? They were white supremacists both.

I googled “Woodrow Wilson fought for civil rights” just out of curiosity. Here is what I got:

“No results found for ‘Woodrow Wilson fought for civil rights.”

Rev. Jackson, Rev. Sharpton, and Congresswoman Waters, my question is in the light of documented facts, why are many public schools, streets, a bridge, etc. today named after this American white supremacist and segregationist president?

Where are the calls to change names, tear down statues, etc.? Where are the Congressional resolutions to denounce him? Why does this American white supremacist and segregationist president get a pass from his odious racial beliefs and practices when alleged white supremacists and alleged racists are excoriated by the media and by many African American leaders? Why was I even not taught of Wilson’s racism in my U.S. history course in college?

Why all the silence about your progressive Democratic racist president Woodrow Wilson?

And you all call President Donald Trump “racist.”

In Portsmouth, Virginia there is a Woodrow Wilson High School. That school has a majority Black student population. According to “U.S. News and World Report,” the school has a 62% Black population — https://www.usnews.com/education/best-high-schools/virginia/districts/portsmouth-city-public-schools/woodrow-wilson-high-20576/student-body. In the light of the revealed history of this white supremacist president, is there any reason why any of those Black students should be proud of the name “Woodrow Wilson”?

Until you three openly denounce the open racism of Democratic President Woodrow Wilson, the most racist white president in U.S. history, are not your denouncements of President Donald Trump as being “racist” laughable, totally meaningless, and lacking in substance?

(Some material taken from my original article “BIOPIC ON WOODROW WILSON? BAD IDEA, MR. DICAPRIO,” published THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 19, 2013 https://illinoisreview.typepad.com/illinoisreview/2013/09/biopic-on-woodrow-wilson-bad-idea.html)

 

 

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