In 1946, Isaac Woodard, a Black army sergeant on his way home to South Carolina after serving in WWII, was pulled from a bus for arguing with the driver. The local chief of police savagely beat him, leaving him unconscious and permanently blind. The shocking incident made national headlines and, when the police chief was acquitted by an all-white jury, the blatant injustice would change the course of American history. Based on Richard Gergel’s book Unexampled Courage, THE BLINDING OF ISAAC WOODARD details how the crime led to the racial awakening of President Harry Truman, who desegregated federal offices and the military two years later. The event also ultimately set the stage for the Supreme Court’s landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, which finally outlawed segregation in public schools and jumpstarted the modern civil rights movement.
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© 2021 WGBH Educational Foundation
00:00 Prologue
03:24 Isaac Heading Home
11:53 Violence Against Veterans
16:23 Woodard Comes Forward
21:34 Lewisohn Benefit
26:53 Fighting For Justice
34:34 Trial Of Shull
41:36 The Warings
49:40 Truman’s Decision
57:14 The Warings and Civil Rights
01:01:07 Elmore V. Rice Trial
01:04:19 The Dixiecrat Revolt
01:10:43 The Warings’ New Friends
01:16:58 Summerton, South Carolina
01:21:25 Thurgood Marshall
01:24:12 The Trial
01:41:10 Waring Pens His Dissent
01:43:04 The Brown v. Board of Education Decision
01:48:04 Coda
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