The Inevitable Patterns of American History, Part 2

Richard Gergel, Unexampled Courage: The Blinding of Sgt. Isaac Woodard and the Awakening of President Harry S. Truman and Judge J. Waties Waring

This essay follows from The Inevitable Patterns of American History, Part 1

Isaac Woodard served three decorated years in the Pacific Theatre of World War II, before returning to segregated America. On February 12, 1946, just hours after receiving his honorable discharge, while still wearing his uniform and carrying his discharge papers, a White police chief pulled Woodard, who was Black, off a Greyhound bus on specious charges. Chief Lynwood Shull then beat Woodard so severely, both his eyeballs burst in their sockets, leaving him permanently blind.

What followed changed America. Racial violence was widespread following World War II, as it often is following America’s overseas wars, but Woodard broke the mold in one important way: he survived his attack. Most victims of racial violence in this era left a lynched corpse, and a close-lipped cadre of white witnesses, who were mostly perpetrators too, unafraid of consequences. Woodard found several allies, from Thurgood Marshall to Orson Welles, and eventually President Harry Truman.

When local prosecutors refused to charge a White lawman for beating a Black man, Truman ordered his Justice Department to commence a civil rights suit. Justice officials, unwilling to offend local law enforcement, made only a salutary prosecution. Seated before a white judge, J. Waities Waring, and an all-white jury, the Justice Department proceeded to apparently throw the case. Judge Waring was horrified. Years later, he said he’d never seen a case so deliberately bungled.

Both President Truman and Judge Waring descended from Southern slaveholders; Waring was considered classical Southern gentry. Both, however, had deep-rooted principles of fairness. When their ideals of justice came sideways across Southern race hierarchy, both men needed to decide which credo they’d rather support. Shown evidence that an honored veteran couldn’t get justice on the home front, they flinched. To their credit, both men would rather be honest than class-bound, and both became surprise anti-racists.

Isaac Woodard, in uniform, with his mother.
Archive photo, Georgia State University

Shocked by courts’ inability to provide Woodard justice, Truman engaged with civil rights like no President before. He became close with Walter E. White, head of the NAACP; later, he became the first sitting President to address the NAACP. When a coalition of Northern Republicans and Southern Democrats stonewalled his civil rights bill, Truman used the media to hold them accountable. This secured his second term, and also broke the Dixiecrat stranglehold on his party.

Judge Waring, simultaneously, used his bench to advance civil rights. Once indifferent to Black issues, Waring began reading scholars like Gunnar Myrdal, and became close with Thurgood Marshall. When he almost single-handedly overturned South Carolina’s longstanding Whites-only primary elections, he became a celebrity, appearing on the cover of Time magazine. His reforms had national implications. Then in 1951, already seventy years old, Waring became the first judge to dissent against Plessy v. Ferguson since 1895.

According to his press bio, David Gergel, author of the present volume, is a federal judge serving in the same Charleson, South Carolina, courthouse where Judge Waring once presided. This gives him access to troves of primary documents, which probably explains why Gergel so thoroughly understands Waring, a man Americans have largely forgotten. Gergel’s survey of Truman’s reforms is electrifying, but also broad. His most specific and historical chapters deal extensively with Judge Waring’s accomplishments.

Truman’s experience desegregating the military and government provided extensive evidence that races could work together in high-pressure environments. Waring’s rulings permitted important civil rights cases to flow into the Supreme Court docket. Between them, the President and the federal judge helped create the conditions that made Brown v. BOE possible. That’s not saying these two White government officials caused it to happen. History is too complex for that. But it couldn’t have happened without them.

Evidence suggests that Sergeant Woodard, who lived until 1994, never truly appreciated how his case influenced civil rights history in America. Despite being celebrated by stars like Woody Guthrie and Billie Holliday, and taken on national tour like a rock star, he eventually faded into obscurity, as news figures do, and lived a quiet retirement in New York. Yet both President Truman and Judge Waring explicitly acknowledged Woodard for jolting them out of their indifference.

Isaac Woodard suffered violence, and accidentally became a linchpin of history. He made institutional racism visible, which energized government officials to address the problem. And it’s tragic that this event has receded from memory. As Gergel quotes Truman telling a blue-ribbon panel in 1947, discussing lynchings which still happened when he was a boy: “There is a tendency in this country for that situation to develop again, unless we do something tangible to prevent it.”

See also: Why a Town Is Finally Honoring a Black Veteran Attacked by Its White Police Chief