Isaac Woodard

There is a lot to report today. I want to say something about a TV program we saw on PBS, and also report on both the visio divina session and the Uncanny Journeys course last Wednesday. The TV show was The Blinding of Isaac Woodard, which was on American Experience. It was very well produced and it was about a piece of American history that I knew nothing about, but should. We all should. Isaac Woodard should be a household name - like Rosa Parks. His contribution to civil rights in this country is at least as important as hers, and he paid a higher price for it. Isaac Woodard was an African-American veteran of WW2, a decorated sergeant, who was discharged from the army 76 years ago today, Feb. 12, 1946, in Augusta, Georgia, and who boarded a Greyhound bus headed for his home town in South Carolina. Soon into the ride from Georgia, Woodard asked the bus driver if he could use the restroom at the next stop. The white bus driver initially refused his request, but later in the trip he begrudgingly stopped in the town of Batesburg, SC. The bus driver, still furious over having to stop and reportedly not being addressed as “sir” by Woodard, told the white police chief of Batesburg, Lynwood Shull, about Woodard’s behavior. Shull and a few other police officers forcibly removed Woodard, who was still in his Army uniform, from the bus. Inside the jail, Shull brutally beat the WWII soldier, permanently blinding him. The next day, Woodard was convicted of drunk and disorderly conduct. He didn’t receive any medical attention for three days after the attack and his family did not find out about the attack until three weeks after it happened. This outrageous event eventually received national attention, largely through the NAACP and in particular the efforts of Thurgood Marshall, the Dir. of Legal Affairs. President Harry Truman was so angered by the reality of an army veteran being brutally beaten by a police officier that he was aroused to take action: by Executive Order, he formed a bi-racial Civil Rights Council to investigate violations of civil rights, and he de-segregated both the armed services and the federal workforce. That is already a lot, but there is more. The police chief, Lynwood Shull, who brutally beat Woodard, was tried in a federal court in Charleston, SC, and acquitted by an all-white jury. The presiding judge, J. W. Waring, was so appalled by the blatant racism he saw displayed in his courtroom, he experienced a conversion to the cause of civil rights. He and his wife, Elizabeth, educated themselves and it was he who initiated a case which did not just challenge the inequality of the education of black children in South Carolina, it challenged the legal notion of "separate but equal" and the system of segregation it supported. That case went to the Supreme Court, and bound with other cases became Brown v. Board of Education, in which the Court, by a 9-0 vote, declared segregated education in the U.S. to be unconstitutional. All that we owe to Isaac Woodard, and of course, all those moved by what happened to him, and outraged by the systemic racism that made that not only possible but acceptable and to most white Southerners, even justifiable. Woodard himself was a gentle soul who did not let his blindness deter him from becoming a warrior for civil rights: he toured the entire country, telling his story, sponsored by the NAACP. Eventually he was honored by a roadside plaque in Batesburg, SC. He died in 1992. We owe him a great deal.

Isaac Woodard standing in front of his commemorative plaque.