Their President’s record on race relations was not very good, either. When Wilson was elected, he fired most of the African Americans who held federal posts and segregated the Navy, which until then had been desegregated. During Wilson’s first term in office, the House passed a law making racial intermarriage a felony in the District of Columbia and his Washington offices were segregated, with the those of the Treasury and Navy soon following suit.

Wilson told black leaders that, “The purpose of these measures was to reduce the friction. It is as far as possible from being a movement against the Negroes. I sincerely believe it to be in their interest.” But Wilson was a born southerner and held deep views on the superiority of his own race.

D. W. Griffith quoted Wilson in his 1915 epic ‘The Birth of a Nation’: “The white men were roused by a mere instinct of self-preservation… until at last there had sprung into existence a great Ku Klux Klan, a veritable empire of the South, to protect the Southern country” (from Wilson’s “A History of the American People”). The Klan soared in popularity soon afterward. Wilson believed white southerners to be the only legitimate citizens and expressed fears of what might occur in a south “ruled by an ignorant and inferior race.”

Wilson had to deal with a new generation of African American leaders, men such as William Monroe Trotter, W.E.B. Du Bois and Marcus Garvey, and the results were not always pleasant, although the media did a good job of spin control. When Wilson allowed segregated government offices, the National Independent Political League’s William Monroe Trotter led a delegation which protested this policy. Wilson’s explanation that “segregation was caused by friction between the colored and white clerks, and not done to injure or humiliate the colored clerks” did not satisfy Trotter. Trotter was thrown out of the White House and he stood on the White House lawn afterward and held a press conference detailing what had just taken place.

W.E.B. Du Bois had been influenced by pro-war forces and supported America’s entry into war. Yet, when black workers began moving north to work in the big war factories, they were not welcomed, and race riots broke out in cities. A riot in St. Louis in 1917 left 100 blacks and eight whites dead or severely beaten. Another incident took place in Houston when members of the 24th infantry tried to challenge some of the city’s Jim Crow laws. A fight erupted between some of the black soldiers and white civilians which left several people dead. The government tried sixty of the soldiers in late 1917 and thirteen received the death penalty and forty-one life imprisonment. The thirteen were hanged a month later. Subsequent trials brought more convictions and more death sentences and the media attributed the racial unrest to “German propaganda.”

In 1986, the National Archives released previously classified information detailing the surveillance of African-Americans during World War I by the U.S. Army’s Military Intelligence Division. Many facts came to light regarding the government’s activities under Wilson. African-Americans were singled out for special attention by the Four Minute Men and organized into a separate division because the CPI worried that African-Americans lacked loyalty and were particularly “vulnerable to German propaganda.” In fact, the concern about “black radicalism” was strong enough that the government created a military intelligence unit under the direction of Major Walter Loving who cooperated with the CPI. Together they produced a strategy of manipulating blacks. Loving tried to recruit prominent blacks to support the war and threatened and intimidated those who expressed “radical or anti-war views.” The CPI disseminated propaganda geared for the black press and put intense pressure on their leaders. Creel held a three-day conference in Washington for black newspaper editors and commended them for their important service. Legal action was threatened against editors and their papers who did not fall in line quickly enough. The war needed bodies, and it did not matter of they were black or white.