Racist President helped perpetuate Red Summer of 1919

Woodrow Wilson, last racist president till the current occupant, governed during the Red Summer of 1919, in which hundreds were killed, mainly blacks, with thousands injured in over 50 race riots across the US. Chicago news outlets have focused on one of the worst, right here in Chicago, which ignited a century ago today. But missing from these reports was the response of the Wilson administration, which not only didn't speak out against white mobs that started virtually every riot, it blamed the entire outbreak on Bolshevist agitators who he claimed egged blacks on to defend themselves from encroaching violence with guns. Wilson didn't hold back declaring "The American Negro returning from abroad would be our greatest medium in conveying Bolshevism to America." Government agencies and the media took their cue from Wilson. Young J. Edgar Hoover, early in his Justice Dept. career, told the Attorney General that the Washington D.C. riots were the "result of numerous assaults committed by Negroes upon white women" The Washington Post picked up the theme calling for a white "clean up operation" against black rioters defending themselves from the white mobs.

Wilson disgraced himself by governing with the easy racism he grew up with in Jim Crow Virginia. The current racist president doesn't have Wilson's excuse, growing up in privilege in tolerant New York. His false equivalency of white supremacists with anti racist protesters in Charlottesville, his demeaning of congresswomen of color, his endless demonization of inner city neighborhoods of his minority critics, his cruel, brutal treatment of minority asylum seekers are all of a piece with his racist core.

How sorrowful a racist president fueled racist violence in 1919 and a racist president in 2019 has learned nothing from his predecessor a hundred years on.