1/x I suspect most people don’t care whether Princeton renames the Wilson school, especially if that gesture is meant to be it. But there is one saving grace about this and it is an opportunity to have a move adult view of our history, including Woodrow Wilson.

2/x So, here's a true story about 3 men: Robert Smalls, a former slave & one of the first Blacks to serve in Congress, Tomas Dixon, Jr., the author whose book & screenplay was used for DW Griffith’s Birth of A Nation, and Woodrow Wilson, the 28th President of the United States.

3/x Smalls was born into slavery around 1839 in Beaufort, South Carolina. His first owner was his father; his second, his half-brother. When Smalls was 12 or 13, his half brother began hiring him out as a laborer on the Charleston harbor.

4/x In time Smalls learned to be a sailor. When the civil war began Smalls was hired as a pilot for The Planter, a 300-ton steamship that had been retrofitted as a warship for the confederacy.

5/x In May 1862, Smalls gathered his family, and a crew of 8 blacks, sailed the Planter in the middle of the night out of Charleston Harbor, and delivered the ship, loaded with cannons, to nearby Union forces. For that he received a reward of $1,500 and his freedom.

6/x He enlisted in the Union army and served through the war. When the war ended he returned to Beaufort and used the reward money to buy the house of his former master, his father. He then settled down and went into politics.

7/x The first important political role Smalls got was to be a delegate to the South Carolina convention called to ratify the 14th Amdt. At the close of the war, Lincoln had made it clear that conf. states would be readmitted into the Union only if they ratified the 14th.

8/x So Smalls, this former slave, was one of the votes at the convention to ratify the 14th and get South Carolina readmitted into the Union. He then was elected to the South Carolina State Legislature, then to the U.S. House of Representatives.

9/x He was reelected several times, lost his district, & regained it even after Reconstruction ended & whites resumed power, which means he kept getting reelected with large segments of the white vote. In time he would retire form Congress and become a federal customs inspector.

10/x There is no evidence that Thomas Dixon Jr ever met Smalls. He was educated at Wake Forrest, & John Hopkins, where he met Woodrow Wilson. Dixon was a failure at most things he tried until he wrote the 3 volumes series for which he is best known.

11/x The titles in the series speak for themselves: Volume 1: The Leopard's Spots: A Romance of the White Man's Burden. Vol. 2: The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan; Vol. 3:The Traitor: A Story of the Rise and Fall of the Invisible Empire

12/x D.W. Griffith used the books to make his movie: Birth of a Nation, which portrayed Blacks as savages rampaging through Reconstruction. The movie came out in 1915. Dixon helped promote the film by enlisting the help of his old college friend, now President Woodrow Wilson.

13/x Wilson screened the film in the White House & arranged a screening for SCOTUS. There was some attempt to boycott the film in NY until folks learned that the President & SCOTUS had seen and liked the film and judged it a “fair and accurate” representation of Reconstruction.

14/x Wilson’s support was not just out of loyalty to this college friend. By now, it is well known that Wilson himself was an avowed white supremacist. He was a member of Virginia aristocracy, well educated, but also a hardcore racist even when measured by the mores of his times.

15/x There is not enough space on this thread to catalogue Wilson’s racism. Suffice it to say that one of his main achievements was to reinstate Jim Crow in Washington DC when he became President after DC had gone a long way toward ending it.

16/x Birth of a Nation is significant because it helped popularize a view of Reconstruction that would last until the early 1960’s. That view held that Reconstruction was a disaster and that blacks were not ready for self- government.

17/x Birth of a Nation came out on Feb. 8, 1915. Smalls died on Feb. 23, 1915. He has a connection to the movie, even though It is unlikely he saw it before he died. When Wilson was elected President in 1913, Smalls was then a federal customs inspector.

18/x One of Wilson’s priorities was to try eliminate every senior position in the federal government where Blacks supervised whites. He was pretty successful at it and he is credited at having destroyed the middle class in D.C. But he did not limit himself to D.C.

19/x One of the federal officials Wilson fired was Robert Smalls, the man who had survived being owned by his father and his brother, fought in the civil war, and voted to ratify the 14th Amdt.

20/x One of my mentors, a brilliant lawyer/scholar, Professor Peggy Davis, wrote a law review article about Smalls, titled Introducing Robert Smalls. Some of the facts, thought not all, in this thread are taken from the article. She inspired me to keep thinking about Smalls.

21/x Here's why I connect Wilson to Smalls: Wilson was a smart man and as President he can rightfully be credited with a number of achievements at home and abroad. He was in his day, and indeed even in the context of our times, a progressive.

22/x He was also a man born into wealth his family accumulated through slave labor and, for all of his education, for all of his urbane sophistication, for all of his progressive bona fides, he lived and died believing that Black people were, as a group, inferior.

23/x And he acted upon that belief to visit incalculable pain and hardship on millions of people here in the US and also abroad when, among other things, he had U.S. Marines occupy Haiti. (Not that I'm bitter, mind you; no sir.)

24/x For his part, Smalls will never be as well known as Wilson and will never be credited as much as Wilson for having shaped this country. And maybe as an objective matter that’s the way it should be. Maybe in the larger calculus of things Wilson “mattered” more than Smalls.

25/x But, on a human level, the arc of Smalls’ life is more remarkable than Wilson’s, & on a human level Smalls achieved more than Wilson: he was born into slavery, freed himself, fought to free others, & helped ratify what is arguably the most important consitutional amdt

26/x Simply put: The distance Wilson had to travel between his wealthy upbringing to the Governorship of NJ, and the presidency is objectively much shorter than that which Smalls had to travel between being enslaved by his own father and getting elected to Congress.

27/X But the fact that Wilson could have so cavalierly held the power to take apart a life Smalls had more than earned with more courage than the vast majority of us will ever know is a demonstration of what we mean by white supremacy.

28/28 I honestly don't care what Princeton does with the name of the Wilson school. What I care about is every time we begin to revisit these questions we dig deeper into the reasons why these questions keep coming up.

PS yes, for anyone of a certain worldview who's about to tweet at me that Wilson was a democrat, yes, I am aware of that fact.

One point about Princeton: first time I walked on campus (as a grown man with a career) I felt like a peasant wrapped in rags, covered in mud, mumbling incoherent grunts. Didn’t feel that way at Harvard or Yale. There’s just something about Princeton that SCREAMS power & money.