Woodrow Wilson’s legacy of racial segregation can be condemned even by the standards of his own time

After months of debate and protests, the trustees of Princeton University this month rejected demands to remove Woodrow Wilson’s name from the university’s facilities but agreed that the university should do more to present Wilson’s contributions to segregating US society. Richard Rothstein writes, however, that the trustees blundered by accepting the claim that Wilson’s actions were reprehensible by the values of “our times.” We do not have to judge Wilson’s actions by the standards of today, Rothstein says; the standards of many of Wilson’s early 20th century contemporaries are more than enough to condemn his views and actions on segregation.