White schools' prejudice gives black students world-class education (Situational Irony)
As Shetterly writes, “The white schools’ prejudice was the black schools’ windfall: with almost no possibility of securing a faculty position at a white college, brilliant black scholars…taught almost exclusively at Negro schools.” World-class scholars such as Elbert Frank Cox, Dudley Weldon Woodard, and W. E. B. Du Bois taught at black-only schools because white institutions wouldn't hire them; the prejudice of white institutions guaranteed a superior education for the very people they were prejudiced against.
Segregation laws heighten racial tension (Situational Irony)
Ironically, segregation laws, which proponents claimed were intended to decrease racial tension, in fact increased it. Shetterly notes that “If the segregation laws were designed to reduce friction by keeping the races apart, in practice they had the opposite effect,” specifically citing the logistical complications of buses. Jim Crow bus laws—whites at the front, Negroes at the back—only work on buses with front and back doors and with two bus conductors. With only one door (as many were made) or one conductor (as most lower-income areas could afford), riders at the back of the bus have to pass through the entire front of the bus twice on their journey, bringing them very close rather than segregating them. Segregation laws, ironically, rarely increased racial segregation—just heightened racial awareness.
President Wilson's "humanitarianism" (Dramatic Irony)
“It was no small irony that Woodrow Wilson, the president who had authorized the creation of the NACA and who received a Nobel Peace Prize for his promotion of humanitarianism through the League of Nations, was the very same one who was hell-bent on making racial segregation in the civil service part of his enduring legacy.” (Page 94)
Here Shetterly calls out a very specific irony: President Wilson was awarded for his humanitarianism, but contemporary readers (with information, retrospect, and perspective) understand that his discriminatory domestic policies (and overt personal racism) are a part of his "enduring legacy" that's particularly ironic in the context of his Nobel Peace Prize.
