An upcoming PBS documentary will recount the story of Isaac Woodard — a Black army sergeant pulled from a bus in 1946 for arguing with the driver, savagely beat by a South Carolina police chief, and left permanently blind.
Orson 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. The publicity that Welles stirred prompted the Truman administration to launch an investigation.
Portions of the broadcasts are heard in the American Experience documentary, The Blinding of Isaac Woodard, which debuts on PBS on Tuesday, March 30, at 9 p.m. It details the brutal attack on Woodard and subsequent search for justice.
“The NAACP felt that [Welles’] 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 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. He was acquitted by the all-white jury after less than 30 minutes of deliberations in November 1946.
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.
His Commentaries broadcasts for ABC Radio are considered the pinnacle of his political activism. They 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.
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