JARED BALL: Welcome, everyone, back to the Real News Network. I'm Jared Ball here in
Baltimore.
Executive editor and founder of Black Agenda Report Glen Ford joins us again for this week's
Ford Report. Glen, welcome back to the Real News.
GLEN FORD: Thanks for having me here.
BALL: So at Princeton University students want to rid themselves of the racist symbol
that has become Woodrow Wilson. The students at Harvard want the same regarding their law
school's founder Isaac Royall. Students across the pond at Oxford are expressing solidarity
with these efforts and their own to rid their university of the racist legacy of Cecil Rhodes.
And here in Baltimore, Towson State University students are protesting the lack of diversity
in faculty and student body. And the students at Brown University have earned a response
from administrators there, which says $100 million over 10 years will be invested in
an effort to diversify their campus. Glen Ford, what do you see all this meaning?
FORD: Well, Jared, it seems that being a founding white father ain't what it used to be. And
that's a good thing, isn't it?
At Princeton they don't want to just drag Woodrow Wilson's name through the mud. They
want it taken off of the prestigious school of public policy, and to take it off of a
residential college on that campus. And they want there to be established mandatory courses
at Princeton that would teach the history of marginalized peoples. And not just black
folks, but Asians and others, all of whom Woodrow Wilson had no time or space for.
But disassociating Woodrow Wilson from Princeton University is for that college a very big
deal, because he was president of Princeton before he moved into the White House, and
took the nation into World War I. And while he was in the White House, he also introduced
for the first time Jim Crow segregation into the federal civil service. And while he was
at that, he wrote about what such a great organization the Ku Klux Klan was. All of
this was a great shock to the growing civil rights movement of the time, and especially
to W. E. B. Du Bois, because W. E. B. Du Bois had urged other blacks to switch their traditional
allegiance to the Republican party and try Wilson. And the reason that Du Bois did that,
because he was fed up with the racism of a previous president, Teddy Roosevelt. Teddy
Roosevelt, in addition to all kinds of racist statements, had dishonorably discharged 167
black soldiers from the U.S. Army after they had a clash with local whites in Brownsville,
Texas. So that really tore it between W. E. B. Du Bois and Teddy Roosevelt, who then endorsed
Woodrow Wilson's candidacy.
But Woodrow Wilson turned out to be even worse. He approved the execution by hanging of 19
black soldiers who'd gotten into a clash with local whites in Houston, Texas. All the while
he was bringing Jim Crow to the federal civil service. Woodrow Wilson is also known, and
in fact better known, as being a champion of the League of Nations. And because he championed
the League of Nations, the forerunner to the United Nations, lots of people, those who
know anything at all about Woodrow Wilson, or think they do, think of him as being some
kind of progressive or a liberal president. But for Woodrow Wilson, his League of Nations
was meant to be nothing but a white man's club. A club of the imperial powers, which
the United States had joined, that would use the organization to better enslave the colored
and colonized people of the world who would run the world like a white man's club, which
was the way he ran Princeton University. When he was president of Princeton not one black
student was allowed on campus.
Today's protesters at Princeton say that they don't want to erase the name of Woodrow Wilson
fro history. They want to expose Woodrow Wilson and all of his evil deeds in terms of history,
and teach a different kind of history. But their protest and the protests that you enumerated
at the beginning of this piece also invite the question, which American presidents were
not racist? And what U.S. institutions are not rooted in slavery and genocide and the
imperial murder of millions of people? The fact of the matter is, yes, Woodrow Wilson
was an evil man and a racist man. But evil and militarism and racism play very well in
the United States today.
BALL: Well, I did mean to ask you very quickly what this all meant in terms of the nation
in which we live. As you sort of mentioned. I mean, here we are, at least I am, in Baltimore.
Named after Lord Baltimore. Right down the road from a city named after Washington, DC.
In fact, the Washington monument is--there's a monument to him here in this city, as well.
And all over the country, north and south, we have a number of institutions, roads and
streets, et cetera, named after some of the worst forms of humanity the world has ever
produced. I've thought of that in preparing for this conversation with you. But also this
idea that this is happening, you know, 50-60 years after a black power and black studies
movement which sought to bring about the same or similar demands to college campuses. The
institution of black studies, Africana studies, et cetera. What do you think all this might
mean in terms of sort of the cycle of revolution, or the idea that revolution is a process,
not an event?
FORD: Well, here we have this burgeoning, incipient movement which began as a response
to police state violence. But when it spreads to college campuses, people thrown down their
buckets where they are. And start--and since college is supposed to be a place of learning,
black students are demanding that the curriculum reflect truths that were not previously recognized,
including the truths about the United States. So I think it's quite a good sign that a movement
that gets a rejuvenation based on police violence issues now seems to be talking not just about
a whole revenge of economic issues and other things, but about the very nature of the United
States, which is reflected on those place names, and these people that are given homage
in the United States. There needs to be quite clearly a, a total evaluation of the place
that we live in and what we want to do with it.
BALL: Glen Ford, thanks again for joining us here at the Real News.
FORD: Thank you.
BALL: And thank you for joining us here as well. For all involved, again, I'm Jared Ball
here in Baltimore saying again, as Fred Hampton used to say, to you we say peace, if you're
willing to fight for it. So peace, everybody, and we'll catch you in the whirlwind.