Germany has outlawed herself among the nations because she has disregarded the sacred obligations of law and has made lynchers of her armies…
We proudly claim to be the champions of democracy. If we really are, in deed and truth, let us see to it that we do not discredit our own. I say plainly that every American who takes part in the action of a mob or gives it any sort of countenance is no true son of this great democracy, but its betrayer.
– Woodrow Wilson, July 26, 1918
When Wilson issued his “Statement Deploring the Mob Spirit,” he was comparing America’s lynch mobs to German soldiers who committed massacres, rapes and war crimes during World War I (the German soldiers included a young Iron Cross recipient named Adolf Hitler).
Black America was confused.
Everyone knew Wilson didn’t care about Black people. This was the guy who re-segregated the federal government and hosted Klan movie night in the White House. As commander-in-chief of the U.S. military, he hadn’t been concerned with the mobs that targeted Black WWI veterans. When a white mob organized a terror attack on East. St. Louis’ Black residents in 1917, Wilson said nothing. He had been silent on mass racial violence against Black soldiers in Houston, Black shoppers in Chester, Penn. and Black people just attending a “colored fair” in Lexington, Ken.
In the September 1918 issue of The Crisis, NAACP investigator Walter White cleared up the confusion and explained why one of the most racist presidents in history was suddenly interested in stopping white supremacist violence.
The holocaust.
No, not that one.
