By the end of the summer of 1945, World War II had come to an end. Over the next several months, many of the twelve million veterans returned home; 880,000 of these were black Americans. They had gone overseas to put their lives at risk in the fight for freedom and democracy, and they came home to find these ideals were not meant for them in their own country.
Ironically, the Ku Klux Klan became reenergized by the returning black veterans, who wore their uniforms and seemed to know no fear, and thought they could assert their equality. The response of the KKK was a renewal of violence. Some of the more egregious examples:
In Alabama, when a black veteran removed the Jim Crow sign on a trolley, an angry streetcar conductor unloaded his pistol into the ex-Marine. The Chief of Police found him staggering away and administered a single bullet to his head, finishing the job.
In South Carolina, another veteran complaining about Jim Crow transportation had his eyes gouged out with the butt of the sheriff’s billy club.
In Louisiana, a black veteran who defiantly refused to give a white man a war memento was dismembered, castrated, and blow-torched.
And there is the story of Sergeant Isaac Woodward, a twenty-seven-year-old black veteran, upon being honorably discharged from Camp Gordon in Augusta, Georgia, was pulled from a public bus (still in his uniform), incarcerated, and during the night, he was beaten so badly that he was blinded in both eyes (one was gouged out).
In 1946, U.S. Army Sergeant Isaac Woodard challenged a Greyhound Bus driver while traveling from Georgia to North Carolina after being discharged from service in World War II. Police officers who met him at the next stop brutally attacked him and left him permanently blinded. The attack on Woodard and similar stories of mistreatment of other black servicemen returning from the war let to new national pressures on racial segregation and discrimination and to the integration of the Armed Services in 1948.
Isaac Woodard was born in Fairfield, South Carolina but grew up in Goldsboro, North Carolina. He enlisted in the U.S. Army on October 14, 1942 at Fort Jackson in Columbia, South Carolina, and served in the Pacific as part of a labor battalion. Woodard received an honorable discharge at Camp Gordon, Georgia in early February 1946. Along with a contingent of other discharged soldiers, black and white, Woodard boarded a Greyhound Bus on February 12th to travel back home to North Carolina. A conflict was triggered when the bus driver belittled the army veteran for asking to take a bathroom break. At the next stop, Woodard was met by the Chief of Police Linwood Shull of Batesburg, South Carolina, who along with his deputies, beat Woodard savagely with their nightsticks. He was later charged with drunk and disorderly conduct before finally being taken to a veteran’s hospital in Columbia, South Carolina.
The NAACP took up Woodard’s case in the spring of 1946, pressing military officials to provide assistance to the gravely injured veteran while also calling for legal action against Chief Shull. By September, NAACP officials met with President Harry Truman who expressed outrage over this assault on a veteran. Shull was tried in federal courts but released after the jury deliberated only thirty minutes. As news of this attack circulated in the national media, President Harry Truman created the first President’s Committee on Civil Rights (PCCR) which published To Secure These Rights in 1947. This groundbreaking report led to the desegregation of the military in 1948 and new federal attention to racial inequality as a matter of both domestic justice and out of concern for Cold War politics.
For many Americans, Isaac Woodard became a sympathetic figure representing the larger conflicts of Jim Crow emerging after World War II. The public response to the vicious attack upon Woodard, as well as that of President Harry Truman, signaled a major shift in public support for civil rights during the 1940s.
Isaac Woodard died in the Bronx, New York on September 23, 1992. He was 73.