Spot light: Woodrow Willson, Progressive

Are you a progressive?

http://www.academia.org/progressive-segregation/
"Few presidents are as revered as Woodrow Wilson in academia. He was, after all, the last academic elected to America’s highest office. "

“I do approve of the segregation that is being attempted in several of the departments,” President Wilson wrote in his first year in office. “I think if you were here on the ground you would see, as I seem to see, that it is distinctly to the advantage of the colored people themselves that they should be organized, so far as possible and convenient, in district bureaus where they will center their work.”

"Similarly, when U. S. forces entered the “war to end all wars,” President Wilson may have wanted to “make the world safe for democracy” but as commander-in-chief he did so with a segregated military. “World War I brought no improvement in Wilson’s policy towards blacks,” Bartlett writes. “They were put in segregated military units, mostly relegated to support positions, and kept out of combat.” "

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woodrow_Wilson
Segregation in the federal government

In 1912, "an unprecedented number"[5] of African Americans left the Republican Party to cast their vote for Democrat Wilson. They were encouraged by his promises of support for their issues. The issue of segregation came up early in his presidency when, at an April 1913 cabinet meeting, Albert Burleson, Wilson's Postmaster General, complained about working conditions at the Railway Mail Service. Offices and restrooms became segregated, sometimes by partitions erected between seating for white and African-American employees in Post Office Department offices, lunch rooms, and bathrooms, as well as in the Treasury and the Bureau of Engraving and Printing. It also became accepted policy for "Negro" employees of the Postal Service to be reduced in rank or dismissed. And unlike his predecessors Grover Cleveland and Theodore Roosevelt, Wilson accommodated Southern opposition to the re-appointment of an African American to the position of Register of the Treasury and other positions within the federal government. This set the tone for Wilson's attitude to race throughout his presidency, in which the rights of African Americans were sacrificed, for what he felt would be the more important longer term progress of the common good.[5][76]