Presidents, Race and the Military, in the 1940s and Now

On Feb. 12, 1946, Tech. Sgt. Isaac Woodard Jr. boarded a bus in Georgia to return home to his wife in South Carolina after completing service in New Guinea and the Philippines. During the ride, Woodard, who was black, asked the bus driver if he would have time to “take a piss” at the next stop. The driver, objecting to Woodard’s language, said, “Boy, go on back and sit down and keep quiet and don’t be talking out so loud.” Fresh from serving his country in wartime, the soldier shot back: “Goddamn it, talk to me like I’m talking to you. I’m a man just like you.” An hour later during a scheduled stop in Batesburg, S.C., the incensed bus driver called over local law-enforcement officers, telling them that the soldier’s foul mouth offended a white female passenger. The police confronted Woodard and dragged him out of sight of the other passengers to unleash a barrage of baton strikes and punches to the face that ruptured his eyeballs. Still in uniform, he was taken to jail and held overnight. The next morning, his eyesight now permanently gone, the police gave him a hot towel and some eye drops and left him at the nearest veterans’ hospital. Woodard survived war overseas only to be blinded by the war at home.