More than 100 years ago, hundreds of Black federal workers were herded into corners, screens were set up around them and one man even “had a cage built around him to separate him from his white companions of many years,” W.E.B. Dubois wrote in an open letter to the president of the United States in 1913.
The letter was addressed to President Woodrow Wilson, who arrived in D.C. in 1913 to find something he hadn’t seen anywhere — a diverse federal workforce, where Black and White professionals had been working together for years, helping run the American government.
That was shattered when Wilson, the first Southerner elected to the White House since the Civil War, brought his segregationist ethos to the nation’s capital.
As President Donald Trump ordered the dismissal of all federal workers associated with diversity, equity and inclusion programs this week, it’s fitting to remember the way things were last century, when Wilson shamed and ruined the Black federal workers of our nation.
They were part of Black Washington’s pride, a middle-class workforce that took more than 50 years to come to fruition as hundreds of men and women moved to the nation’s capital, passed the civil service exams and worked in the executive offices of the federal government, rising into the ranks of white-collar workers, above the usual custodial jobs they were often relegated to.
“Washington was an island of possibility for ambitious black men and women at a time when racism cordoned them off from most of the economy and set ceilings on the jobs they could not get,” Eric S. Yellin, history professor at the University of Richmond, wrote in his book, “Racism in the Nation’s Service: Government Workers and the Color Line in Woodrow Wilson’s America.”
In 1912, in a city that was as segregated as the rest of the nation, thousands of Black men and women who worked in federal offices in Washington made up at least 10 percent of the federal workforce, according to the Woodrow Wilson House.
It “had been integrated in the early days of Reconstruction and continued to be so up to Wilson’s arrival at the White House,” the Wilson House wrote on its website. “African American federal workers had the professional opportunities and resources to build a network of thriving, though segregated, educational and communal institutions in Washington, D.C.”
It all began crumbling on April 11, 1913, when Postmaster General Albert Burleson came to Wilson with a complaint.