Wilson was the only President to have been a child in the South during the Civil War and Reconstruction, so if background ever excuses prejudice, it does for him. Maybe it doesn't, but if. We've had lots of racist Presidents without so much of an excuse.

What counts is not whether he personally were a racist, but what he did. Truman was pretty racist, but when the chips were down he supported civil rights. Wilson's policies for blacks were pretty bad all right, but I don't believe racial policy is a GO TO JAIL, GO DIRECTLY TO JAIL card that trumps everything else. Let's judge him by mixing it up with all his other policies. The most important single policy of his term was the League of Nations, for which he gets an A for vision and an F for implementation.