“Woodrow Wilson’s racist thinking and policies make him an inappropriate namesake for a school or college”. This is a direct quote from President Chistopher L. Eisgruber who recently implemented the removal of Woodrow Wilson’s name from all programs and buildings at Princeton University. Not only was Woodrow Wilson a student at Princeton, he was a professor there for several years and later became president of the university. As President, he refused to admit any Black students and erased the earlier admissions of Black students from the university’s history.

As President of the United States, he segregated the federal civil service after it had been racially integrated for decades, and fired Black federal workers with the excuse that, “There are no government positions for Negroes. A Negro’s place is in the cornfield.” During his presidency, for the first time ever, photographs were required with job applications as a means to eliminate Black applicants. The Wilson Administration routinely ignored outcries from Black citizens for assistance against lynchings and other forms of discrimination and actually enforced and favored racist, segregationist policies. He insisted that these policies were for the comfort and best interest of both Blacks and Whites. Wilson also published a book named,“A History of the American People” with the overall message being sympathetic to the Ku Klux Klan, “a great” group of people that he says was rightly established to preserve the White race and the South. A quote from the book would later be included in the well-known overtly racist film, “The Birth of a Nation”. In 1881, an article written by Wilson defended the South’s suppression of Black voters, saying that they were being denied the right to vote not because their skin was dark, but because their minds were dark. 

The time to act is now. “Maintaining monuments to reprehensible people and their policies out of a misplaced sense of history is foolish and insulting to African Americans who suffered for centuries under slavery and Jim Crow.” Currently, Beckley has a 22.1% population of African American residents. Their children are suffering by going to a school named after a devout racist. We choose to suffer no more. Naming public schools after political leaders suggests that the person being honored is an outstanding role model for students, faculty, and those who live in the community. Woodrow Wilson’s actions speak for themself. We do not send Jewish children to Adolf Hitler High School, so why are Black students being forced to attend a school whose ‘role model’ used his power at every available opportunity to diminish and absolutely deny their safety and human rights? We stand with Princeton University and other schools in their fight against racism and DEMAND that appropriate action be taken to eradicate the name Woodrow Wilson from our high school.