Wilson and the Politics of Race

Description: Join Adriane Lentz-Smith (Duke University), Eric Yellin (University of Richmond) and Trygve Throntveit (Wilson Center) for a discussion of Woodrow Wilson's racial thought, policies, and legacies, and what we can learn from them today. What are some of the major events in Wilson's career that have led so many scholars to castigate him for his racism in recent years? What does Wilson's racism and the current public discourse around it tell us about the politics of race in America, in his day and ours? Panelists will speak individually and with one another on these topics and others gleaned from the audience. 

Adriane Lentz-Smith is Associate Professor and Associate Chair in Duke University's department of History where she teaches courses on the Civil Rights Movement, Black Lives, Modern America, and History in Fact and Fiction. A scholar of African American history as well as the histories of the twentieth-century United States and the US & the World, Lentz Smith is author of Freedom Struggles: African Americans and World War I (Harvard University Press, 2009). The book explores how African Americans worked through ideas of manhood, citizenship, and global encounter to pursue the black freedom struggle during World War I and build the civil rights movement that followed. Her article, “The Unbearable Whiteness of Grand Strategy,” can be found in the forthcoming volume, Rethinking American Grand Strategy.

Eric S. Yellin is Associate Professor of History and American Studies at the University of Richmond. He is Senior Curatorial Consultant and script writer for the new Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, DC, and completing an edited volume on the history of public work in the United States with Dr. Frederick W. Gooding, Jr. Dr. Yellin is author of Racism in the Nation’s Service: Government Workers and the Color Line in Woodrow Wilson's America, and his public history writing has been featured in The Washington Post, USA Today, The Conversation, and elsewhere.

Consistent with its mission as a national memorial to the 28th U.S. president,  the Wilson Center’s History and Public Policy Program is launching “Woodrow Wilson - Then and Now," a new series of scholarly conversations exploring the significant and complicated legacies of the man and his presidency for our own day. Moderated by Trygve Throntveit, Global Fellow for History and Public Policy, the series will be a platform for an inclusive and critical discussion of Wilson’s biography, his White House tenure and his longterm impact on US foreign and domestic politics.