05/04/2026
Donald Trump is taking a page from Pres. Woodrow Wilson's playbook. Almost 19% of the 2.4 Million Federal Employees are African American so when you want to downsize Federal Employees is will disproportionately hurt African Americans. This is another example of what I mean when I say 'Your understanding of Politics is directly related to your Understanding of History'. - Historian & National Political Commentator Michael Imhotep founder of The African History Network
Before the election of President Woodrow Wilson, Black Americans worked at all levels of the federal government. But when Wilson assumed office in 1913, he mandated that the federal workforce be segregated by race—leading to the reduction of Black civil service workers’ income, increasing the significant income gap between Black and white workers, and eroding some of the gains Black people had made following Reconstruction.
That’s the finding of a recent National Bureau of Economic Research working paper by Berkeley Haas Asst. Prof. Guo Xu and Berkeley Law Asst. Prof. Abhay Aneja, PhD 19, who examined how Wilson’s far-reaching segregation policy affected Black workers relative to white workers during the same era.
“The segregation of the federal civil service is a dark chapter in the history of the American government that has been relatively understudied,” Xu says. “Persistent racial inequality remains a major challenge in this country, and we felt it was important to provide systematic quantitative evidence on the economic costs of such episodes of state-sanctioned discrimination.”
Though Black voters had historically supported the Republican Party, Wilson, a Democrat, gained the support of many Black voters—including W.E.B. Dubois, Booker T. Washington, and Monroe Trotter—due to his campaign promise of equal treatment. His racial segregation order “came swiftly and suddenly, taking Black Americans by surprise,” the researchers wrote. Wilson imposed segregation in his Cabinet departments, and appointed Southern Democrats, who were likely in favor of segregationist policies, to lead them.
The researchers point out that unlike the purported “separate but equal” policies of the Jim Crow era, Wilson’s order was overtly discriminatory. “Wilson’s segregation directive was designed to limit the access of Black civil servants to white-collar positions via both demotions and the failure to hire qualified Black candidates,” they wrote.
Segregation was implemented first at the Post Office, which was home to over 60% of federal jobs at the time and employed many Black workers, and next at the Treasury Department, which had the second largest number of Black workers. To examine how Wilson’s segregation mandate affected them, the researchers relied on several historical data sources. First, they digitized the 1907–1921 U.S. Official Registers, which list every person who worked for the federal government. They also used personnel records from the U.S. Postal Service, and linked them to the 1910 U.S. Census.
SOURCE: University of California Berkeley
https://newsroom.haas.berkeley.edu/research/how-woodrow-wilsons-racist-segregation-order-eroded-the-black-civil-service/
