As Woodrow Wilson prepared to launch his 1916 reelection campaign from the Shadow Lawn estate on the Jersey Shore, he planned to ask the American public to trust him as he ran on the campaign promise “he kept us out of war.” But there was one group who had supported him four years earlier and now felt his pledges were worthless. Although he had been the governor of New Jersey, Wilson was a Southern Democrat born in Virginia, and this fact made many African-Americans nervous.

One of the most prominent was William Trotter, the editor and publisher of the Boston Guardian, who later recalled,…