Prior to Wilson’s inauguration in 1913, African-Americans had been making slow but steady progress in federal employment and were about 5 percent of all federal civil servants nationwide, working side by side with whites. They occupied managerial positions as well, sometimes directing an integrated workforce.
Wilson’s Cabinet officers demoted African-Americans and denied them any further promotions to prevent them from ever being in supervisory positions over whites. Federal departments installed curtains to separate black and white clerical workers, segregated cafeteria sections by race for the first time and created separate bathrooms that black workers had to use in the basements of government buildings.
In 1914, the federal civil service instituted a policy of requiring photographs on all job applications, to ensure that more black workers would not be hired. In a New York Times op-ed on the Princeton students’ protest, Gordon Davis, a prominent African-American lawyer, described how his grandfather was peremptorily demoted from a well-paying position as a supervisor in the Government Printing Office to a messenger in the War Department, at half his previous salary. He lost a home and died “a broken man.”
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