Lies My Teacher Told Me

In politics, the white electorate had become so racist by 1892 that the
Democratic candidate, Grover Cleveland, won the White House partly by
tarring Republicans with their attempts to guarantee civil rights to African
Americans, thereby conjuring fears of “Negro domination” in Northern as well
as Southern white minds. From the Civil War to the end of the century, not a
single Democrat in Congress, representing the North or the South, ever voted
in favor of any civil rights legislation. The Supreme Court was worse: its
segregationist decisions from 1896 (Plessy) through at least 1927 (Rice v.
Gong Lum, which barred Chinese from white schools) told the nation that
whites were the master race. We have seen how Woodrow Wilson won the
presidency in 1912 and proceeded to segregate the federal government. Aided