Woodrow Wilson’s childhood home gets name change amid reconsideration of racist legacy

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Local preservationists have renamed the childhood home of Woodrow Wilson to better reflect the former president’s upbringing in the Reconstruction-era South just after the Civil War, part of a broader reconsidering of his and the country’s legacy of racism.

The home in Columbia, South Carolina, was formerly called the Woodrow Wilson Family Home, but has been renamed The Museum of Reconstruction Era at the Woodrow Wilson Home, according to the Post and Courier.

“This shift in title does not erase the site’s history,” Historic Columbia member Dawn Mills-Campbell told the local city council earlier this year, according to the Post. “It gives Historic Columbia and Richland County a more forward-facing role in addressing the ongoing dialogue around the importance of the Reconstruction era to current events.”

The group purchased the site, where the president lived as a teenager, in 2014, and added more elements to highlight the importance of the Reconstruction era, when the federal government occupied former Confederate states and free Black people won new constitutional freedoms, provoking violent backlash from white supremacists.

The museum, one of America’s only ones dedicated to the Reconstruction period, features pieces like a shotgun fired by a member of the Red Shirts, a militia that intimidated and killed Black people to prevent them from voting.

The move is part of a broader re-evaluation of Mr Wilson, who once enjoyed a high reputation as a committed internationalist for forming the League of Nations, a forerunner to the United Nations. Despite his diplomatic achievements, many of his other actions were explicitly dedicated to racial segregation and white supremacy, including praising the Klu Klux Klan, segregating the federal work force, and keeping black students out of Princeton University while he was the school’s president.

The university in 2020 moved to strip his name from its public policy school and a residential building, citing this legacy.

“Wilson’s racism was significant and consequential even by the standards of his own time,” Princeton’s president, Christopher L. Eisgruber, said in a statement. “He segregated the federal civil service after it had been racially integrated for decades, thereby taking America backward in its pursuit of justice. He not only acquiesced in but added to the persistent practice of racism in this country, a practice that continues to do harm today."