White Heritage: Then and Now

Corey Stewart is a white nationalist Republican nominee for the Virginia senate race. His views are consistent with the racial segregation policies invoked by fellow Virginian, President Woodrow Wilson.

Stewart recently tweeted: “Nothing is worse than a ‘Yankee' telling a Southerner that his monuments don’t matter.” Twitter, April 24, 2017.

Wilson implemented a policy to segregate blacks from whites in the post office and other federal workplaces.

This practice began on May 31, 1913, when seven black clerks at postal headquarters were screened off from their white coworkers, although none of their coworkers had requested it.  Restrooms and some work rooms at Post Office Department headquarters and in a few other agencies’ headquarters were also segregated.  The lunch room at headquarters, meanwhile, had apparently already been whites-only, and remained so.  When asked why there was no lunch room for black employees, the building superintendent bluntly explained that “as no restaurants in Washington were open to colored people, the government could not be expected to furnish one.”

African-American political leaders, many of whom had encouraged their followers to vote for Wilson, felt betrayed.  In 1914, President Woodrow Wilson—himself a Virginian— met with an angry delegation of black protesters, informing them that segregation was implemented “for their own benefit.” One member of the black delegation, William Monroe Trotter, demanded an accounting, noting that “for fifty years white and colored clerks have been working together in peace and harmony.” Trotter’s angry tone infuriated Wilson, who told Trotter that there was no discrimination in federal agencies, and that “segregation had been inaugurated to avoid friction between the races, not to injure the negro.”

Too bad William Faulkner, an astute observer of race discrimination, isn’t alive to tweet. He might repeat the following from his Requiem for a Nun: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past. All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born, webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity.”