American Experience: “The Blinding of Isaac Woodard” (WGBH-TV, PBS, aired March 30, 2021)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night Charles and I watched a quite compelling American Experience program on PBS called “The Blinding of Isaac Woodard.” Isaac Woodard was an African-American war veteran who returned home in 1946 and intended to pick up his wife, whom he hadn’t seen in four years, in their former home town in South Carolina, after which he planned to take her to New York City, where his parents were already living, and settle there. Shortly before his scheduled trip was supposed to end, he asked the bus driver to let him off at the next stop and then allow him to return so he could use the restroom – itself a controversial issue in the charged and largely absurd racial politics of the time and place because few towns in the South Carolina back country had restrooms Blacks were allowed to use. Instead of acceding to Woodard’s request, the driver got insulted and contacted the police, who met the bus in the town of Batesburg, stopped it, pulled Woodard off it and not only gave him a savage beating, one of them – the town’s police chief, Linwood Shull – stuck the end of the billy club in each of Woodard’s eyes in succession and twisted it, thereby blinding him for life.

The case reached the attention of Walter White, the executive director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) – and yes, unlike most people referring to it nowadays, the narrator of this show used the group’s full name. Not only was he named “White,” Walter White was light-skinned and didn’t look particularly Black, and he had become controversial within the African-American civil rights community (such as it existed in 1946) for expending most of what little political capital the group had in pursuit of a federal statute to make lynching a federal crime. (Lynching is still not a federal crime: the last attempt to make it so was blocked in the Senate last year by Rand Paul, R-Kentucky.) The heart of the NAACP’s efforts then was the Legal Defense and Education Fund, which was mounting a long-term effort to get the courts to reverse themselves and declare racial segregation unconstitutional; this show mentions two of the three key lawyers at the Fund, Thurgood Marshall and Robert Carter (though they omit the third one, Spottswood W. Robinson), and their strategy was to bring cases that would force Southern states to live up to the promise of “separate but equal” in the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson case that legitimized segregation.

The NAACP’s strategy was to prove in court that the separate facilities for Blacks were in practice vastly unequal to those for whites, and therefore Southern governments and companies would be forced to render them equal – and hopefully to abandon segregation altogether because it would be easier and cheaper to let Blacks use the white facilities than to lay out the capital needed to make the Black facilities equal. Woodard’s case became a cause célèbre in 1946 largely due to the efforts of Orson Welles, who was then doing a current-events radio show and used all his formidable dramatic talents to bring the Woodard story to life; the first sound we hear on this documentary is Welles’ voice reading Woodard’s signed affidavit describing what had happened to him. The show mentions President Harry Truman and his unlikely emergence as a champion of civil rights, especially considering his background; he was from Missouri, a state so strongly aligned with the South that in 1861 President Lincoln had literally put it under martial law to prevent it from seceding and joining the Confederacy.

Truman grew up with a mother who regarded John Wilkes Booth as a national hero and, when he was President, refused to sleep in the Lincoln Bedroom when he had her over at the White House. But when he became President he was so appalled by the treatment of returning Black servicemembers in general and Isaac Woodard in particular he did a 180° on civil rights and became a stronger champion of equal rights for African-Americans than any President (or at least any President since Ulysses S. Grant, who for all the corruption within his administration was not only a strong advocate for Black civil rights but at least attempted to stop the genocide against Native Americans as well) before him. Truman ordered the U.S. Attorney for South Carolina to prosecute Shaw for the assault on Woodard, but the U.S. Attorney was an unapologetic racist who basically threw the case; he put on only two witnesses, Woodard himself and the driver of the bus (the man who’d met Woodard’s request to use the bathroom with a racist slur), and the jury inevitably – for that time and place – acquitted him.

But the case struck the conscience of at least one white man in the courtroom: the judge, Julius Waties Waring. This program makes it seem like the Woodard case was his road-to-Damascus awakening to the injustice of the South’s racism, but in fact Waring had begun his transformation before that. He had started by routinely throwing out cases in which white farm owners would buy consumer debts held by Blacks and force them to work off their debts on the plantations – essentially an attempt to revive slavery while maintaining technical compliance with the 13th Amendment – and he’d already begun to reform his own courtroom, including ceasing to designate the race of potential jurors so Blacks (or at least the handful of Blacks who had actually been able to navigate the obstacle courses white Southern state governments set up to keep them from voting) would have as good a chance of getting on a federal jury in Waring’s courtroom in Charleston as whites.

When the Woodard case landed in his lap Waring’s first instinct was to duck it – he was already starting to get a reputation as being “soft” on racial matters from his rulings in debt peonage cases. But he agreed to hear the case, and he was appalled at the sloppy case the government put on. Waring was also transforming his personal life at the time; he broke up with his first wife (though since South Carolina did not allow divorce at all at the time, the first Mrs. Waring had to go to Florida to obtain her divorce decree) and he remarried to a Michigan-born woman who took him outside the South and exposed him to people, including New York-based record producer John Hammond (who was white and from a rich family but had become well known for his advocacy for civil rights, both as an NAACP board member and his work in the music business; it was he who arranged for Benny Goodman to hire the Black pianist Teddy Wilson and appear publicly with him as part of the Benny Goodman Trio).

The Warings also read up on Southern racism through books like An American Dilemma by Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal and The Mind of the South by W. J. Cash, who was harder than Myrdal for the Southern racists to dismiss because Cash was a white Southerner himself). In 1947 Waring got to hear a challenge by the leaders of the South Carolina Democratic Party to evade the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1944 Smith v. Allwright decision outlawing whites-only primary elections by having the South Carolina legislature repeal every law dealing with primary elections so the Democratic Party could declare itself a “private club” to admit whomever it wanted – and to exclude all Blacks. Waring not only found for the Black plaintiffs, he wrote a scording opinion (Waring’s opinions on racial cases have the fervor of the convert about them) saying, among other things, “It is time for South Carolina to rejoin the union.” A lot of his detractors said snidely, “He’s got a union he should rejoin” – meaning his first marriage – and some were even nastier. He got the usual death threats, mostly in barely legible handwritten scrawls. The Ku Klux Klan burned a cross in his backyard, and on one occasion assailants threw two bricks through his window, which the Warings feared were gunshots. (A paper called the Pee Dee Advocate published a little squib about the attacks that ended, “Unfortunately, the judge was not hurt.”)

Isaac Woodard himself appeared as part of a giant benefit concert held at New York’s Lewisohn Stadium to raise money for him that featured major Black entertainers like Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday and Pearl Bailey. (The appearance of the composer of Black, Brown and Beige and the woman who’d sung “Strange Fruit” is no surprise, but seeing Pearl Bailey’s name abd photo on the concert bill was.) One person who attended the concert told Woodard that within 10 years he’d be forgotten – which turned out to be true (the makers of this show themselves seem to have forgotten about him in the second half, which is about Waring and his involvement in one of the cases challenging school segregation that ultimately became linked as Brown v. Board of Education; it was heard by a three-judge panel and Waring was the lone dissenter, but his dissent is a fiery denunciation of racism that ended, in words Waring underlined, “Segregation is per se inequality” – words that got echoed in Earl Warren’s court opinion in Brown: “Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal”), though a tag sequence describes him as having been relatively successful.

He husbanded his money and by the time he died in 1982 he had bought several properties in New York City and was living about as well as could have been expected given the horrible thing that had happened to him – about which he spoke in a late-in-life television interview in a matter-of-fact tone that showed he’d long since let go of his bitterness. This American Experience program was PBS at its best, tellilng an incredibly dramatic story and getting out of the way so the viewers can make the connections themselves and not feel like they’re being propagandized. But there’s also a plus ça change, plus ça même chose aspect to it, especially since in what was almost certainly a coincidence PBS showed it on what turned out to be the second day of Minneapolis former police officer Derek Chauvin for killing unarmed African-American George Floyd. Though Chauvin’s trial has already lasted longer than Shull’s and it’s clearly a case being brought by prosecutors who want to win it, it’s an indictment of America’s continued racism that unarmed Black people are still being assaulted and killed by police, and in a coincidence I’m sure the filmmakers intended they pan down a list prepared in 1945 of people who were lynched that year, and one of the names on it is … “George Floyd.”