By MIKE TEAL and RAY KELLY
Seven decades before Black Lives Matter protesters took to the streets over police brutality, Orson Welles took to the airwaves in a series of broadcasts demanding justice for a decorated black veteran Isaac Woodard, who had been beaten and blinded by white police officers.
Freshly discharged from Camp Gordon in Georgia and heading home, Sgt. Woodard was still in uniform when he was pulled off a Greyhound Bus by South Carolina police officers on February 12, 1946. He was taken to a nearby alley and beaten with nightsticks, resulting in him going blind. It is believed Woodard was targeted because he had asked the bus driver to stop so he could use a restroom.
Welles, long a champion of racial equality, used his Commentaries radio show to demand justice and track down the South Carolina police officer responsible for the blinding.
“There is a price for everything — there is nothing that does not have a cost… What does it cost to be a Negro,” Welles asked listeners. “In Macon, South Carolina, it cost a man his eyes.”
Welles devoted his July 28, 1946 program to reading Woodard’s affidavit and vowing to bring the officer responsible to justice. He continued his crusade over four subsequent Sunday afternoon broadcasts on ABC Radio.
His efforts on behalf of Woodard came just weeks after Lear Radio, which had sponsored Commentaries since its debut 10 months earlier, pulled out because of low ratings. Welles’ pay had been cut from $1,700 to $50 per show.
Still, Welles persisted.
“The NAACP felt that these broadcasts did more than anything else to prompt the Justice Department to act on the case,” the Museum of Broadcasting stated in its 1988 retrospect Orson Welles on the Air: The Radio Years.
The publicity that Welles stirred prompted the Truman administration to launch an investigation.
Truman reportedly said to Walter White of the NAACP, “My God! I had no idea it was as terrible as that. We’ve got to do something!”
The U.S. Department of Justice probe led to Batesburg Police Chief Lynwood Shull and several officers being indicted.
On trial in a federal courtroom, Shull claimed self-defense in beating Woodard and acknowledged his role in blinding the veteran. He was acquitted by the all-white jury after less than 30 minutes of deliberations in November 1946.
Woodard moved to New York City after the trial.
“Negro veterans that fought in this war… don’t realize that the real battle has just begun in America,” Woodard told the Chicago Defender. “They went overseas and did their duty and now they’re home and have to fight another struggle that I think outweighs the war.”
Woodard passed away at the age 73 at a Veterans Administration hospital in the Bronx on September 23, 1992 and was buried with military honors at Calverton National Cemetery. Shull died five years later in South Carolina at the age 95, never punished for his actions.
Welles’ radio career in the U.S. came to an end two months after the Woodard broadcasts concluded.
Those ABC Radio broadcasts, considered the pinnacle of Welles’ political activism, can be streamed online, courtesy of Indiana University in Bloomington, at orsonwelles.indiana.edu
The Harry S.Truman Library & Museum offers on its website a high school level lesson plan on Orson Welles and the Story of Isaac Woodard: The Influence of the Media on Presidential Awareness and Decisions. It is believed the Woodard case had an impact on Truman, who made a historic speech to the NAACP in 1947 and a year later desegregated the U.S. military and submitted a civil rights plan to Congress.
The Commentaries radio broadcast from July 28, 1946 and a BBC Sketch Book television program where Welles recalled the Isaac Woodard case nine years later can be found below:
Commentaries – July 28, 1946
Sketch Book – May 1955
__________
Post your comments on the Wellesnet Message Board.