Isaac Woodard

Isaac Woodard Jr. (March 18, 1919 – September 23, 1992) was an American soldier and victim of racial violence.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.