Racist progressive Woodrow Wilson attended Princeton and ultimately served as the school’s president.

The Associated Press reports.

Princeton Opens Dialogue on Alumnus Woodrow Wilson, Racism

How do you apply 21st-century sensibilities to the legacy of a man raised in the 19th-century South who achieved greatness in the early 20th century at an institution that didn’t begin admitting blacks until the late 1940s and women until 1969?

That is the question faced by a Princeton University committee that has started examining the legacy of alumnus and former President Woodrow Wilson as part of an agreement with students who staged a sit-in to protest his views on race and segregation and urge the Ivy League institution to rename buildings and programs carrying his name.

Wilson was president of Princeton from 1902 to 1910 and served as New Jersey’s governor from 1911 to 1913, when he entered the White House. The Democrat was a leading progressive, credited with creating the Federal Reserve system, guiding the U.S. into World War I and trying to preserve a lasting peace with his “Fourteen Points” and the League of Nations, which won him the 1919 Nobel Peace Prize. But Wilson also supported segregation and appointed Cabinet members who segregated federal departments.

The protesters, both black and white, wanted the school to acknowledge what they said is Wilson’s racist legacy and to rename buildings and programs named for him.


 
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