The League of Nations was created to rule the world. The Wilson administration joined with England and Australia in rejecting Japan’s proposal that the League’s charter confess a commitment to the equality of all peoples. At least President Wilson was being honest. He feared that the relatively good treatment Black soldiers had received in France had “gone to their heads.” To Wilson’s racist Americans, there was nothing more dangerous than a self-respecting Black person with antiracist expectations of immediate equality, rather than the gradual equality of assimilationists or the permanent
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