The recently discharged sergeant had talked back to a White bus driver. This infraction of southern racial etiquette earned Isaac Woodard Jr. a beating from the police. When he resisted the mistreatment, he was struck across the forehead with a blackjack and jailed. The police officer was tried on federal charges, but was acquitted by an all-White jury.
Hours after leaving military service behind in 1946, a decorated Black World War II veteran still wearing his uniform was removed from a Greyhound bus while heading home, beaten by a White South Carolina police chief and left permanently blind. Sgt. Isaac Woodard Jr. brutal encounter with the small-town police official horrified many Americans and prompted cries for justice on behalf of the 26-year-old former soldier. His case even helped spur President Harry S. Truman's drive to integrate the U.S. military beginning in 1948.
This episode was but one example of the numerous injustices done to returning Black veterans during 1946.
1) During late February, armed Blacks in Columbia, Tennessee, fought off a lynch mob of Whites who wanted to kill a former Navy sailor.
2) On 14 July, a group of Whites in Monroe, Georgia, shot to death Army veteran George Dorsey, his pregnant wife, his brother-in-law, and his sister.
3) In August Corporal Marguerite Nicholson was dragged off of a railroad coach and arrested in Hamlet, North Carolina. She had refused to move to the segregated section after the train crossed into the South. The Hamlet Chief of Police beat the 120-pound woman and charged her with violating the state’s Jim Crow ordinance. Corporal Nicholson spent two days in jail and had to pay a $25.00 fine plus $13.25 in court costs.
4) On 8 August in Minden, Louisiana, former soldier John C. Jones was released by the police into the hands of men who tortured him to death slowly with a blow torch and meat cleaver.
News of these atrocities circled the globe to such places as France and the Soviet Union. The revelations were a source of tremendous embarrassment to the United States, which at the time was involved with prosecuting prominent Nazis at Nuremberg for war crimes.
Technical Sergeant Isaac Woodard, Jr. was born on March 8, 1919, on a farm in Fairfield County, South Carolina, and grew up in Goldsboro, North Carolina. He attended local segregated schools, often underfunded for African Americans during the Jim Crow years. Woodard had received his discharge at Camp Gordon, Georgia, on the afternoon of 12 February, 1946. He was returning home with sergeant stripes on his sleeve. The lanky twenty-six-year-old had survived fifteen months of duty with the U.S. Army in the Pacific theater. He had earned a battle star by unloading ships during the campaign against the Japanese for the remote and dangerous island of New Guinea. Hours after he was honorably discharged from the United States Army, Woodard was on a bus traveling from Camp Gordon in Augusta, Georgia, en route to rejoin his family in North Carolina.
The bus came to a stop just outside of Augusta, and Woodard asked the bus driver if there was time for him to use a restroom, when the despicable incident occurred. An argument with the bus driver over the restroom break – a request the bus company’s policy required drivers to accommodate. This led the driver to call the police when they stopped in Batesburg (now Batesburg-Leesville, South Carolina). On getting to the scene, the police chief, Lynwood Shull, and another officer forcibly removed Woodard from the bus. After demanding to see his discharge papers, a number of Batesburg policemen, including Shull, took Woodard to a nearby alleyway, where they beat him repeatedly with batons. They then took Woodard to the town jail and detained him for disorderly conduct, accusing him of drinking beer in the back of the bus.
During the course of the night in jail, Shull beat and blinded Woodard, who later stated in court that he was beaten for saying “Yes” instead of “Yes, sir”. Woodard stated that he lost consciousness and lay on the ground for an unknown period of time. Woodard further testified that he was punched in the eyes by police several times on the way to the jail, and later repeatedly jabbed in his eyes with a blackjack club. The force used by Shull was so great that it broke his blackjack. Shortly thereafter, Shull and Long left for the evening, with Woodard in a semiconscious haze. Newspaper accounts indicate that Woodard’s eyes had been “gouged out”; historical documents indicate that each globe was ruptured irreparably in the socket. He also suffered partial amnesia as a result of the repeated hits on his head.
When Woodard woke the next morning, he could not see. He had been awakened by Shull, who informed him he was due in city court that morning. This presented several practical problems. Woodard reported he was unable to see and needed assistance to move from one place to another. Further, the brutal beating of the night before had left his face covered with dried blood, which he could not see or remove without help. Shull led Woodard to the sink and cleaned him up for his court appearance. Then, said Woodard, Shull guided him to the city court before the Batesburg town judge, H. E. Quarles, who also served as the town’s mayor, where he was convicted of drunken and disorderly conduct and fined $50. He had only $44 in cash, however. The judge took the available money and suspended the remainder.
Shull’s account of the morning differed. He denied that Woodard said he could not see, although one eye appeared “swelled practically shut” and the other was “puffed.” He claimed Woodard was able to negotiate himself over to the city court without assistance and could see sufficiently to count out the money in his pocket. According to Shull, when his case was called, Woodard stated he was guilty and “guessed he had too much to drink.” Judge Quarles would later testify that Woodard was able to see while in the city court that morning and that he pleaded guilty to the charge of drunk and disorderly conduct. Later medical evaluations of Woodard’s eye injuries made Shull’s and Quarles’s claims that Woodard could see that morning implausible if not medically impossible.
After the sham trial, the soldier requested medical assistance, but it took two more days for a doctor to be sent to him. Not knowing where he was and suffering from amnesia, Woodard eventually ended up in a hospital in a different town, receiving substandard medical care. Three weeks after he was reported missing by his relatives, Woodard was discovered in a hospital. He had been immediately rushed to the Veterans Administration Hospital in Columbia, some 30 miles away. Woodard remained at the VA Hospital for the next two months and was treated with antibiotics and other medications related to the traumatic injuries to his eyes. There was no treatment offered or recommended that would restore his vision. Though his memory had begun to recover by that time, doctors found both eyes were damaged beyond repair.
This story might never have come to light but for a tip to the NAACP from John McCray, the editor of Charleston, South Carolina’s Black newspaper, The Lighthouse and Informer. On May 6th, NAACP, Executive Secretary Walter White sent a letter to Secretary of War Robert Patterson along with a copy of an affidavit Woodard had made. Patterson responded a month later that the Army could not take legal action against Shull because Woodard was technically a civilian at the time of the incident. He did suggest that Woodard apply for a pension through the Veterans Administration. Patterson also sent a copy of the letter and affidavit to the governor of South Carolina, Ransome J. Williams.
In addition to writing the War Department, White also tried to obtain additional information about what had happened. He contacted James Hinton in Columbia with a request to look into the matter. Hinton in turn called John McCray, who began investigating. The task was not an easy one. Woodard initially thought he had been blinded in the town of Aiken rather than Batesburg. The attack, which left Woodard completely and permanently blind sparked national outrage and galvanized the civil rights movement in the United States. News of the blinding of a Black World World II veteran traveled beyond the South, much of it carried by the Black press. The NAACP helped Woodard embark on a speaking tour to help people see realities of police brutality up-close. At the behest of Walter White, radio broadcaster and movie director Orson Welles, began broadcasting the first of several programs about Woodard on his American Broadcasting Company radio news show.
Welles did this in dramatic fashion, for several straight weeks throughout the summer of 1946. On his July 28, 1946 episode, Welles opened by reading Woodard's account of his assault in full. Welles read an affidavit which was sent to him by the NAACP and signed by Woodard. He criticized the lack of action by the South Carolina government as intolerable and shameful. Woodard was the focus of Welles's four subsequent broadcasts. With the boost from a national platform and one of the most famous voices in recorded history, Woodard's assault became a national flashpoint. Welles pulled no punches in his criticism of the police in Aiken, a town about 30 miles from Batesburg, in which Woodard's had initial misidentified at the town in which he was beaten.
The Welles broadcasts led to the identification of Lynwood Shull as the police chief who assaulted Woodard, with Welles declaring on-air: “I’ve unmasked him. I’m going to haunt Police Chief Shull for all the rest of his natural life. Mr. Shull is not going to forget me. And what’s important, I’m not going to let you forget Mr. Shull.” It was used by many to attempt to discredit the story, including a segregationist congressman who urged FBI director J. Edgar Hoover to investigate the "highly inflammatory" broadcast.). Municipal leaders from the town were surprised and offended to find themselves the target of such accusations. They promptly banned films by Welles from Aiken theaters and threatened to sue ABC.
Building on the Welles broadcasts, Black newspapers in South Carolina and Georgia began reporting the Woodard story as did the New York Times. Sympathy and support for Woodard spread. The Veterans Administration granted him a monthly pension of $50.00. Forty national organizations met in New York City on August 8 to discuss courses of action to stop the violence against Black veterans. The NAACP encouraged state conferences and local branches to send telegrams to President Truman, Secretary of War Patterson, and Army Chief of Staff General Omar Bradley. A group of prominent politicians, entertainers, and athletes arranged a benefit performance for Woodard.
New York’s Amsterdam News arranged a benefit concert featuring Count Basie and Billie Holliday, among others. The celebrities included the mayor of New York City, heavyweight boxing champion Joe Louis, and actor Paul Robeson. Famed left-wing singer/songwriter Woody Guthrie composed a new song for the occasion, "The Blinding of Isaac Woodard", and performed it for the 20,000 people who attended the show on August 18th 1946. So great was the national outcry that back in South Carolina the Columbia Record encouraged Governor Williams to investigate the treatment of Woodard with the same vigor the state had shown when the false charges had been leveled at Aiken. "Permanent blindness is a terrible price to pay for being drunk," its editor wrote on August 22nd.
Due to South Carolina’s reluctance to pursue the case, on September 19, 1946, seven months after the incident, Walter White met with President Truman to discuss the Woodard case. The NAACP’s committee highlighted the Woodard case in its appeal to Truman to address violence against veterans. After the meeting, President Truman wrote a letter to Attorney General Tom C. Clark ordering a federal investigation to address South Carolina's reluctance to try the case. Later that year, on Dec. 5, 1946, Truman signed an executive order, creating the President’s Committee on Civil Rights, which would issue a 1947 report, “To Secure These Rights,” recommending federal action to address mob violence and police brutality against African-Americans and other systemic deprivations of rights.
On October 2, Sheriff Lynwood Shull and several of his officers were indicted and went to trial in federal court in South Carolina. By all accounts, the trial was a travesty. The local U.S. Attorney charged with handling the case failed to interview anyone except the bus driver. Although the defense attorneys built a persuasive argument that Shull had not violated Woodard’s constitutional rights, they were not content to rest on reason or the evidence. They laced their closing statement with raw appeals to racism. Woodard was a member of the "inferior race." Worse, he lived in New York. "That’s not the talk of a sober nigger from South Carolina," one of the lawyers said. If the all-White jury convicted Shull, they warned, the police would no longer be able to protect wives and children from the dangerous wild Negroes in South Carolina. If siding against the federal government prosecutors meant the state should secede from the Union as it did in 1860, then it should do so again.
After Woodard gave his account of the events, Shull firmly denied it. Shull denied that he beat Woodard into unconsciousness and left him dazed in the town jail overnight. Instead, he claimed that after striking Woodard with his blackjack one time outside the jail, he was able to move the soldier into a cell without further incident. He stated that Woodard voiced no complaints that evening about his eyes and was in good health when Shull left the jail. He claimed that Woodard had threatened him with a gun and that Shull had used his nightclub in self-defense. When confronted with these inconsistencies under cross-examination, Shull admitted he might have struck Woodard with his blackjack on three occasions: at the bus stop, while walking to the jail, and when Woodard attempted to take the blackjack from him.
Isaac Woodard did not obtain justice in court. On November 5th after 30 minutes of deliberation by an all-White jury, Chief Shull was acquitted on all charges. The courtroom broke into applause upon hearing the verdict. The injustice of the case, however, did awaken in the presiding judge, U.S. District Court J. Waties Waring Waring, an eighth-generation Charlestonian, who had become more sympathetic on racial issues since marrying a social progressive from New York City. The Shull trial galvanized Waring. Waring expressed derision toward both the prosecutor, who failed to make his case. He did not interview anyone except the bus driver, a decision that Waring, believed was a gross dereliction of duty. A year later, Justice Waring ruled that that the state’s Democratic primary could no longer prohibit African Americans.
But his most significant decision came in his dissent in Briggs v. Elliott (1951), when he called school segregation unconstitutional. When Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP filed the school desegregation case Briggs v. Elliott in Waring’s court in 1950, the judge nudged the plaintiffs to directly challenge the constitutionality of state’s segregation statute. The case then would require a three-judge panel, where Waring would be the first federal judge in 55 years to question the constitutionality of the Supreme Court’s 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision. Court rules would rocket the case directly to the Supreme Court who would then have to wrestle with Waring’s dissent, challenging Plessy.
Briggs v. Elliott was combined with four other cases and decided by the U.S. Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education (1954). The pitiable outcome of the trial influenced a move towards civil rights initiatives at the federal level. President Harry Truman met with NAACP leadership a month after Shull's acquittal. Truman may have held little sway over the South Carolina courts. But he was not without influence. One direct result was the establishment of the Civil Rights Commission. The assault on Woodard became the basis of a national pivot on policy, with Truman making civil rights a substantial part of his first term in office.
In July 1948 Truman issued two Executive Orders, (Executive Order 9981 and Executive Order 9980) banning racial discrimination in the military and desegregating the federal government. Truly, the blinding of Isaac Woodard Jr. had long-term ramifications that shaped the United States and the world in unintentional ways. Why in this case did the local resonate so clearly with the state, national, and global? Why did it attract so much attention when numerous other Black veterans who were mistreated, killed or maimed more gruesomely—went unnoticed? Woodard’s decision to move to the Bronx made a tremendous difference. New York provided a large base of supporters, both Black and White. The area was home to the national NAACP and other civil rights organizations. It had The New York Times and headquarters for the major radio networks.
Timing played a major role as well. Although Woodard suffered his injuries in February, word of the story did not begin to spread until July. That is when news broke during the following month about the horrendous murders of veterans George Dorsey in Georgia and John C. Jones in Louisiana. Unlike Dorsey and Jones, Woodard could go on national tour and make speeches. This ability was especially significant in an era where radio, not television, ruled the airwaves. For the 20,000 people who attended the benefit in New York City and the 17,000 who saw the veteran at mass meetings during the fall of 1946, Woodard put a face on a nation’s shame.
For Sergeant Isaac Woodard, now twenty-seven, blinded, unemployed, abandoned by his wife, and limited to a VA pension below subsistence level, “hopeless” might have seemed an apt prognosis of his life ahead. Indeed, the shabby treatment accorded many returning Black veterans became a source of international embarrassment for the United States. The incidents made Americans—who championed individual liberty and condemned Nazis for racism—look like hypocrites in the eyes of the world and gave the Soviet Union a propaganda victory in the growing Cold War. That Woodard’s blinding took place during an election year helped, too. President Truman felt pressure to act, and various civil rights organizations used the outrage to mobilize voters. These efforts did not bear immediate fruit, but they set the stage for the elections of 1948.
Ten years after the attack in South Carolina, Woodard’s days assumed a quiet rhythm. A 1956 Jet Magazine profile on him—entitled “Isaac Woodard: America’s Forgotten Man”—described him doing “his morning rounds,” waving to neighbors and stopping at a newsstand and local shops. “I make out all right,” he said, “but I just can’t see.” In the 1960s, Congress passed legislation that gave full disability to service members injured between the time of their discharge and their arrival at home.
In 1978, with the help of a VA loan, Woodard increased his real estate investments by purchasing another home in the Bronx. He lived there with his sons Isaac Woodard III, whom he had with a new partner, and George, whom he adopted. Woodard stayed out of the spotlight, but the trauma of the incident always stayed with him. In a Sep. 16, 1982, interview with the public affairs TV program Like It Is, Woodard said he was frustrated that the police officer who blinded him kept his job. But he didn’t allow it to lose his faith in humanity. “Everybody ain’t bad,” as he put it. In the late 1980s, Woodard who had faded into obscurity, began having health problems. He died in September 1992.
Orson Welles Denounce Police Brutality Against Black WWII Isaac Woodard Jr. veteran. On his July 28, 1946 episode, Welles opened by reading Woodard's account of his assault in full. With the boost from a national platform and one of the most famous voices in recorded history, Woodard's assault became a national flashpoint.
A Benefit concert held in August 1946 at Lewisohn Stadium in Harlem for Isaac Woodard Jr, which featured celebrities both Black and White from across the country. The event featured prominent performers like Billie Holiday, Woody Guthrie, and Joe Louis, drawing a crowd of nearly 20,000 people and raising over $10,000.