How a Soldier’s Beating Helped Desegregate the Military

Isaac Woodard, hours after being honorably discharged from the Army in 1946, was maliciously assaulted by a white South Carolina police officer and left permanently blind. The attack became a catalyst for the American civil rights movement and President Harry Truman’s orders to desegregate the armed forces. NAACP Get your news from a source that’s not owned and controlled by oligarchs. Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily. In 1946, a Black Army veteran was returning from World War II when a white police officer pulled him off a Greyhound bus and beat him blind. The details were fuzzy. No one was sure about the identity of the police officer. The veteran, Isaac Woodard, didn’t even know what town he was in when it happened. Radio host Orson Welles learned about the shocking crime and pledged to find the officer who did it. “We’ll call the policeman ‘Officer X,’” Welles said on his Sunday evening program. “He might be listening to this; I hope so. Officer X, I’m talking to you. Wash your hands. Scrub and scour, you won’t blot out the blood of a blinded war veteran.” This week on Reveal, the podcast Radio Diaries brings us Woodard’s story, from his beating to the outrage that prompted the military’s desegregation. And to understand the experience of a Black servicemember today, we speak with Kyle Bibby, a Marine Corps veteran and co-founder of the Black Veterans Project.