The views of a lot of past Americans on "racial equality" can be tough to read because bigotry is illogical.
For instance, I grew up giving Henry Ford credit for the his fair treatment of blacks during the thirties and forties. He offered blacks good jobs at equal pay in GM plants at a time few employers would. He set up black GM dealerships across the country. In my neighborhood, Henry Ford was a good guy. I was an adult before I learned of his anti-Semitism.
TR, as well, was complicated. While he believed that the white race was, as a group, a superior race, he accepted that individuals of other races could lift themselves up to deserve equality with whites.
To me, that's more a function of believing in a hierarchy of cultures rather than physical race. In his day, that was a similar belief of black people as well. Although it's common for American cultural academics to set Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois against one another, both saw that the slave culture impressed upon black people was dysfunctional and black Americans needed to rise above it to general equality.
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