What was the year the Woodrow Wilson noticed segregated armed forces and changed the law to enforce the equal employment among races in armed forces?

Answer 1

Woodrow Wilson did not "notice segregation" in the armed forces - he expanded it to include all departments in the executive branch of the federal government during his two terms (1913-21) in office. In 1912 black civil rights leaders, many hoping for Wilson, the one-term Governor of New Jersey, would bring a new sense of racial equality to the US government. Teddy Roosevelt had tried it in 1908 but had been slapped down by the Democrats when he invited and hosted Booker T. Washington to dinner at the White House. Across the South - and, even in other parts of the country - Democrats denounced Roosevelt for deigning to invite a Negro to the presidential mansion. William Howard Taft, Roosevelt's successor, did not wish to make enemies with leading Southern Democrats in Congress and did not repeat Roosevelt's "mistake." In 1912, with Taft running for re-election, many black leaders, including W.E.B. Du Bois and William Monroe Trotter, among others, got assurances from Wilson, the Democrats' presidential nominee, that he would work to integrate blacks into the government even more than Roosevelt and Taft had done. Du Bois and Trotter took Wilson at his word, but had they looked, they would have noticed that Wilson, when serving as President of Princeton University in New Jersey, had instituted a strict policy that barred all blacks from the campus. With Wilson's election, he named three rabid segregationists to his cabinet: Albert S. Burleson as Postmaster General, Josephus Daniels as the Secretary of the Navy, and William Gibbs McAdoo (who later married one of Wilson's daughters) as the Secretary of the Treasury. All three men then systematically segregated their departments, barring blacks from eating and other areas where whites were, and ending the practice of giving civil service jobs not based on race but on merit - Wilson even ordered that all job applicants had to furnish a photo with their application, thereby allowing any person doing the hiring to make sure not to hire a black person. When Du Bois and others protested Wilson's horrendous policy - as well as his lie to them to get their support in 1912 - Wilson called them traitors and had them forcibly removed from the White House. The black community was slow to realize what Wilson and the Democrats had done to them; in 1916, black voters, still hoping to get some part of the economic pie in America, again threw their support to Wilson. Re-elected, Wilson once again failed to aid blacks, and, when the US entered the First World War in April 1917, he ordered that black members of the US military not serve in front-line units, or with whites. Black soldiers who did see action only did so by accident.