Isaac Woodard had been out of the Army for hours when a South Carolina police chief jammed a blackjack into his eyes. Eighty years ago this week, on Nov. 5, 1946, an all-white federal jury took about 30 minutes to find that chief not guilty, even though he admitted on the stand that he had blinded him.
Woodard was a sergeant, honorably discharged at Camp Gordon, Georgia, and still in uniform on Feb. 12, 1946, when his Greyhound bus stopped in Batesburg. Police Chief Lynwood Shull and other officers pulled him off, beat him with nightsticks and jailed him. Woodard went about two days without medical care. He never saw again. Black men who had fought in the war came home to a country that treated the uniform as a provocation.
The prosecution was weak. The Justice Department brought the case in federal court in Columbia only after the NAACP pushed, and critics called it half-hearted: prosecutors interviewed little beyond the bus driver. Shull’s lawyer told jurors, in words the courtroom heard, “if you rule against Shull, then let this South Carolina secede again.” Black South Carolinians were shut out of juries by disenfranchisement. When the verdict came, the room applauded.
What happened next is the part of the story most history lessons skip, and it is a story about Black people refusing to let it end there. NAACP leader Walter White took Woodard’s case to President Harry Truman in the Oval Office on Sept. 19, 1946. The NAACP also gave Orson Welles the facts for his radio commentaries that summer. Welles named the chief on air. Before the name was known, he addressed him as a stranger: “Officer X, I’m talking to you. Wash your hands. Scrub and scour, you won’t blot out the blood of a blinded war veteran.”
Truman formed a civil rights committee, and in 1948 he signed Executive Order 9981, which ended segregation in the armed forces. The presiding judge, J. Waties Waring, was so shaken by the trial that he later became one of the South’s most important voices for civil rights from the bench.
Woodard himself moved to New York, where family cared for him, rarely spoke of the attack, and died in 1992. Batesburg-Leesville put up a historical marker in 2019.
A new Radio Diaries episode, covered by Mother Jones this week, retraces the case and talks with Kyle Bibby, a Marine Corps veteran and co-founder of the Black Veterans Project, about Black service members today. The timing matters. Veterans Day is Wednesday, and the lesson of 1946 is plain: nobody in that jury box was ever held to account, and the change came from Black organizers who made the country look. The men and women in uniform now deserve the same insistence on a straight accounting of how this country has treated them.
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