Isaac Woodard facts for kids

Kids Encyclopedia Facts

Quick facts for kids Isaac Woodard Jr.
Born	(1919-03-18)March 18, 1919 Fairfield County, South Carolina, U.S.
Died	September 23, 1992(1992-09-23) (aged 73) The Bronx, New York City, New York, U.S.
Buried	Calverton National Cemetery Calverton, New York, U.S.
Allegiance	United States of America
Service/branch	United States Army
Years of service	1942–46
Rank	Sergeant
Battles/wars	World War II New Guinea campaign
Awards	Good Conduct Medal American Campaign Medal Asiatic-Pacific Campaign Medal World War II Victory Medal

Isaac Woodard Jr. (March 18, 1919 – September 23, 1992) was an American soldier and victim of racial violence. An African-American World War II veteran, on February 12, 1946, hours after being honorably discharged from the United States Army, he was attacked while still in uniform by South Carolina police as he was taking a bus home. The attack and his injuries sparked national outrage and galvanized the civil rights movement in the United States.

The attack left Woodard completely and permanently blind. Due to South Carolina's reluctance to pursue the case, President Harry S. Truman ordered a federal investigation. The police chief, Lynwood Shull, was indicted and went to trial in federal court in South Carolina, where he was acquitted by an all-white jury.

Such miscarriages of justice by state governments influenced a move towards civil rights initiatives at the federal level. Truman subsequently established a national interracial commission, made a historic speech to the NAACP and the nation in June 1947 in which he described civil rights as a moral priority, submitted a civil rights bill to Congress in February 1948, and issued Executive Orders 9980 and 9981 on June 26, 1948, desegregating the armed forces and the federal government.

Early life and military service
Attack and maiming
- National outcry
Aftermath
See also

Early life and military service

Woodard was born 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.

On October 14, 1942, the 23-year-old Woodard enlisted in the United States Army at Fort Jackson in Columbia, South Carolina. He served in the Pacific theater in a labor battalion as a longshoreman and was promoted to sergeant. He earned a battle star for his Asiatic–Pacific Campaign Medal by unloading ships under enemy fire in New Guinea, and received the Good Conduct Medal as well as the Service medal and World War II Victory Medal awarded to all American participants. He received an honorable discharge.

Attack and maiming

On February 12, 1946, Woodard was on a Greyhound Lines bus traveling from Camp Gordon in Augusta, Georgia, where he had been discharged, en route to rejoin his family in North Carolina. When the bus reached a rest stop just outside Augusta, Woodard asked the bus driver if there was time for him to use a restroom. The driver grudgingly acceded to the request after an argument. Woodard returned to his seat from the rest stop without incident, and the bus departed.

The bus stopped in Batesburg (now Batesburg-Leesville, South Carolina), near Aiken. Though Woodard had caused no disruption (other than the earlier argument), the driver contacted the local police (including Chief Lynwood Shull), who 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 nightsticks. They then took Woodard to the town jail and arrested him for disorderly conduct, accusing him of drinking beer in the back of the bus with other soldiers.

Newspaper accounts vary on what happened next (and accounts sometimes spelled his name as "Woodward"), but author and attorney Michael R. Gardner said in 2003:

In none of the papers is there any suggestion there was verbal or physical violence on the part of Sergeant Woodard. It's quite unclear what really happened. What did happen with certainty is the next morning when the sun came up, Sergeant Isaac Woodard was blind for life.

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". He also had partial amnesia as a result of his injuries. 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 billy club. Newspaper accounts indicate that Woodard's eyes had been "gouged out"; historical documents indicate that each globe was ruptured irreparably in the socket.

The following morning, the Batesburg police sent Woodard before the local judge, who found him guilty and fined him fifty dollars. 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 still experiencing amnesia, Woodard ended up in a hospital in Aiken, receiving substandard medical care. Three weeks after he was reported missing by his relatives, Woodard was discovered in the hospital. He was immediately rushed to an Army hospital in Spartanburg. Though his memory had begun to recover by that time, doctors found both eyes were damaged beyond repair.

National outcry

Although the case was not widely reported at first, it was soon extensively covered in major national newspapers. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) worked to publicize Woodard's plight, and it also lobbied the state government of South Carolina to address the incident, which it dismissed.

On his ABC radio show Orson Welles Commentaries, actor and filmmaker Orson Welles crusaded for the punishment of Shull and his accomplices. On the broadcast which was made on July 28, 1946, 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. "The NAACP felt that these broadcasts did more than anything else to prompt the Justice Department to act on the case," wrote the Museum of Broadcasting in a 1988 exhibit on Welles.

Musicians wrote songs about Woodard and the attack. A month after the beating, the calypso artist Lord Invader recorded an anti-racism song for his album Calypso at Midnight; it was entitled "God Made Us All", with the last line of the song directly referring to the incident. Later that year, folk artist Woody Guthrie recorded "The Blinding of Isaac Woodard," which he wrote for his album The Great Dust Storm. He said that he wrote the song "...so's you wouldn't be forgetting what happened to this famous Negro soldier less than three hours after he got his Honorable Discharge down in Atlanta...."

Aftermath

Influence on American politics

In December 1946, after meeting with White and other leaders of the NAACP, and a month after the jury acquitted Shull, Truman established the Civil Rights Commission by Executive Order 9808; a fifteen-member, interracial group, including the President of General Electric, Charles E. Wilson; academics such as John Sloan Dickey from Dartmouth College; and Sadie Tanner Alexander, a black attorney for the city of Philadelphia, as well as other activists. He asked them to report by the end of 1947.

Truman made a strong speech on civil rights on June 29, 1947, to the NAACP, the first American president to speak to their meeting, which was broadcast by radio from where they met on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. The President said that civil rights were a moral priority, and it was his priority for the federal government. He had seen by Woodard's and other cases that the issue could not be left to state and local governments. He said:

It is my deep conviction that we have reached a turning point in our country's efforts to guarantee freedom and equality to all our citizens. Recent events in the United States and abroad have made us realize that it is more important today than ever before to ensure that all Americans enjoy these rights. When I say all Americans—I mean all Americans.

On February 2, 1948, Truman sent the first comprehensive civil rights bill to Congress. It incorporated many of the thirty-five recommendations of his commission. In July 1948, over the objection of senior military officers, Truman issued Executive Order 9981, banning racial discrimination in the U.S. Armed Forces, and Executive Order 9980 to integrate the federal government. (Facilities had been segregated under President Woodrow Wilson). This was in response to a number of incidents against black veterans, most notably the Woodard case. The armed forces and federal agencies led the way in the United States for integration of the workplace, public facilities, and schools. Over the decades, the decision meant that both institutions benefited from the contributions of minorities.

Nevertheless, polls showed opposition to Truman's civil rights efforts. They likely cost him some support in his 1948 reelection bid against Thomas Dewey. Although Truman narrowly won, Gardner believes that his continued championing of civil rights as a federal priority cost him much support, especially in the Solid South. Southern Democrats had long exercised outsize political power in Congress, having disfranchised most blacks there since the turn of the 20th century, but benefiting by apportionment based on total population. Truman's efforts threatened other changes since numerous communities across the country had restrictive covenants that were racially discriminatory. Because of his low approval ratings and because of a bad showing in early primaries, Truman chose not to seek re-election in 1952, though he could have done so. He had been exempted from the term limitations which are imposed by the 22nd amendment.

Influence on popular culture

Welles revisited the Woodard case in the May 7, 1955, broadcast of his BBC TV series, Orson Welles' Sketch Book. Woody Guthrie later recalled: "I sung 'The Blinding of Isaac Woodard' in the Lewisohn Stadium (in New York City) one night for more than 36,000 people, and I got the loudest applause I've ever got in my whole life."

In January 2019, a new book about the Woodard story and its aftermath, Unexampled Courage: The Blinding of Sgt. Isaac Woodard and the Awakening of President Harry S. Truman and Judge J. Waties Waring, was published; it was written by Federal Judge Richard Gergel.

Other

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A group led by Don North, a retired Army major from Carrollton, Georgia, received permission to erect a historical marker in honor of Woodard in Batesburg-Leesville in South Carolina. In 2019 the marker was unveiled. The bottom part of the marker was written in Braille.