Everything about Isaac Woodard totally explained
Isaac Woodard, Jr., often written
Isaac Woodward, (
March 18,
1919 -
September 23,
1992) was an
African American World War II veteran whose beating and maiming, hours after being discharged from the
United States Army, sparked national outrage and galvanized the
civil rights movement in the
United States.
Still in uniform, Woodard was left completely and permanently blind after a run-in with police. The sheriff involved claimed that he'd struck Woodard only once in self-defense, although Woodard claimed otherwise, and suffered a ruptured
cornea and complete blindness in both of his eyes.
South Carolina's reluctance to bring the sheriff to trial prompted federal involvement.
Maiming incident
Background
Woodard, born in
Fairfield County,
South Carolina, grew up in
Goldsboro,
North Carolina. He enlisted in the United States Army on October 14, 1942 at
Fort Jackson in
Columbia, South Carolina and served in the
Pacific Theater in a labor battallion as a
longshoreman. He earned a
battle star, for unloading ships under fire in
New Guinea, and a
Good Conduct Medal, in addition to the
Service medal and
World War II Victory Medal awarded to all American participants in the conflict. He received an
honorable discharge.
Some details of the incident remain unclear, with contemporary newspaper reports conflicting on some points. Newspapers also frequently misstated Woodard's
surname as "Woodward". Woodard himself suffered partial amnesia from the trauma, in addition to his blindness.
On
February 13,
1946, U.S. Army
Sergeant Isaac Woodard Jr. was on a
Greyhound Lines bus traveling from
Camp Gordon in
Augusta, Georgia to his family in
North Carolina. En route to
Winnsboro, South 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. The driver grudgingly acceded to the request after an argument with Woodard. Once the stop was completed, Woodard returned to his seat without incident, and the bus departed.
Maiming
The bus then stopped in Batesburg (now
Batesburg-Leesville, South Carolina). Though Woodard didn't protest, the driver contacted the local police (including Chief of Police Linwood Shull), who forcibly removed Woodard from the bus. After demanding to see his discharge papers, a group of police officers, including Shull, took him to a nearby alleyway, where they proceeded to beat him repeatedly with
nightsticks. Woodard was then taken to the town
jail and arrested for
disorderly conduct, accused of drinking
beer in the back of the bus with other soldiers.
While newspaper accounts of what transpired next vary,
attorney and author Michael R. Gardner wrote,
"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
blinded Woodard. Woodard also suffered partial
amnesia as a result of the injuries.
In Woodard's own court testimony, he indicated that he was punched in the eyes several times on the way to the jail, and later repeatedly jabbed in his eyes with a Billy club. Despite
newspaper accounts
indicating that Woodard's eyes had been "gouged out", historical documents indicate that each bulb was ruptured irreparably in the socket.
The following morning, the police sent him before the local judge, who promptly found him guilty and fined him fifty dollars. He requested medical assistance, but it took two days for a doctor to be sent to him. Not knowing where he was and still suffering from amnesia, Woodard ended up in a
hospital in
Aiken, South Carolina, receiving substandard medical care.
Three weeks after he was reported missing by his relatives, he was discovered in the hospital. Woodard was immediately rushed to an Army hospital in
Spartanburg, South Carolina. Though his memory had begun to recover by that time, doctors found both his corneas damaged beyond repair.
National outcry
Though the case wasn't widely reported in the immediate aftermath of the attack, it was soon reported extensively in major newspapers around the nation. The
NAACP worked to publicize Woodard's plight, campaigning for the state government of South Carolina to address the issue, which it frequently dismissed.
Woodard's story also emerged in popular culture. Via his
radio show,
broadcaster and
filmmaker Orson Welles crusaded for the punishment of Shull and his accomplices. Welles, a follower of the civil rights movement, criticized the reaction of the South Carolina government as intolerable and shameful.
The story emerged in music as well. A month after the beating,
calypso artist
Lord Invader recorded an anti-racism song for his album
Calypso at Midnight entitled "God Made Us All", with the last line of the song directly referencing the incident.
Later that year,
folk artist
Woody Guthrie would record a song for his album
The Great Dust Storm entitled "
The Blinding of Isaac Woodard", saying 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...."
Federal involvement
On
September 19, 1946, seven months after the incident, NAACP Executive Secretary
Walter Francis White met with President
Harry S. Truman in the Oval Office to discuss the Woodard case. Gardner writes that when Truman "heard this story in the context of the state authorities of South Carolina doing nothing for seven months, he exploded." The following day, Truman wrote a letter to
Attorney General Tom C. Clark demanding that action be taken to address South Carolina's apparent reluctance to try the case. Six days later, on
September 26, Truman directed the
United States Department of Justice to open an investigation on the case.
A short investigation ensued, and on
October 2, Shull and several of his officers were
indicted in
U.S. District Court in
Columbia, South Carolina. The case was brought to the federal level on the grounds that the beating had occurred at a bus stop on federal property, and that at the time of the assault, Woodard was in uniform. The case was presided over by Judge
Julius Waties Waring.
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, a decision that Waring, a civil rights proponent, believed was a gross
dereliction of duty. Waring would later write of his disgust of the way the case was handled at the local level, commenting,
"I was shocked by the hypocrisy of my government...in submitting that disgraceful case...."
On the Defense side, the behavior was no better. When the defense attorney began to shout racial epithets at Woodard, Waring had it stopped immediately. During the trial, the defense attorney also stated to the jury that
"if you rule against Shull, then let this South Carolina secede again." After Woodard gave his account of the events, Shull firmly denied it, claiming that Woodard had threatened him with a gun, and that Shull had used his nightclub to defend himself. During this testimony, Shull admitted that he repeatedly struck Woodard in the eyes.
On
November 5, after thirty minutes of deliberation, Shull was found innocent on all charges despite his admission that he'd blinded Woodard. The courtroom broke into applause upon hearing the verdict. The failure to convict Shull was perceived as a political failure on the part of the Truman administration. Shull died in Batesburg, South Carolina on December 27, 1997 at the age of 95.
Isaac Woodard moved North after the incident and lived in the greater New York City metropolitan area for the rest of his life. He died in the Veterans Administration Hospital in
the Bronx on September 23, 1992 at the age of 73, and was buried with military honors at the Calverton National Cemetery in Calverton, New York (Section 15, Site 2180).
Aftermath
Impact on American politics
In July of
1948, over the objection of senior military officers, Truman promulgated
Executive Order 9981, banning racial discrimination in the U.S. Armed Forces. This was done as a response to a number of incidents against black veterans, most notably the Woodard case.
Perhaps owing to his involvement in the Woodard case and his civil rights activism, Truman was behind in his
1948 reelection bid against
Thomas Dewey. Though he narrowly won, his continued championing of civil rights, a cause contrary to public opinion of the time, cost him greatly. By the time he left office in
1953, he chose not to run for a third time due to a 31% public approval rating, though he was
eligible.
Impact on pop culture
On September 28 1946,
Orson Welles, in an ABC Radio broadcast, fulminated against the treatment of Woodard. Welles referred to the then-unnamed lawman who blinded Woodard as "Officer X":
What does it cost to be a Negro? In Aiken, South Carolina it cost a man his eyes. What does it cost to wear over your skeleton the pinkish tint officially described as white? In Aiken, South Carolina it cost a man his soul...
Your eyes, Officer X, your eyes, remember, were not gouged away, only the lids are closed. You might raise the lids, you might just try the wild adventure of looking, you might see something. It might be a simple truth, one of those truths held to be self-evident by our founding fathers and by most of us. If we should ever find you bravely blinking at the sun, we'll know then that the world is young after all, that chaos is behind us and not ahead. Then there will be shouting of trumpets to rouse the dead at Gettysburg, a thunder of cannon will declare the tidings of peace, and all the bells of liberty will laugh out loud in the streets to celebrate goodwill towards all men.
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