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On February 12, 1946, a Negro veteran named Isaac Woodard, who had received his honorable discharge papers only a few hour before and who was still i… - John Gunther
" "On February 12, 1946, a Negro veteran named Isaac Woodard, who had received his honorable discharge papers only a few hour before and who was still in uniform, took a bus at Atlanta for his home in South Carolina. When the bus stopped at a hamlet Woodard asked the driver if he could go to a rest room. The driver refused and a violent quarrel ensued. At the next stop, Batesburg, South Carolina, the driver called a policeman, saying that Woodard had made a disturbance; the policeman took him off the bus, started beating him, carted him off to jail, and ground out his eyes with the end of his club. This case too became a country-wide scandal. A mass rally held in the Lewisohn Stadium in New York raised a purse of $22,000 for the blinded veteran. It did not restore his vision. Attorney General Clark and the FBI instituted an investigation, after much public clamor, and the Batesburg police officer was identified, arrested, and brought to trial. His name was, and is, Lynwood E. Shull. The charge, brought "in a criminal information filed by the Department of Justice," was that Shull violated Woodard's "civil rights" by beating him. Shull's reply was that he had acted in self-defense. A United States district court jury acquitted Shull in half an hour.
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About John Gunther
John Gunther (August 30, 1901 – May 29, 1970) was an American journalist and author. His success came primarily by a series of popular sociopolitical works, known as the "Inside" books (1936–1972), including the best-selling Inside U.S.A. in 1947. However, he is now best known for his memoir Death Be Not Proud, on the death of his beloved teenage son, Johnny Gunther, from a brain tumor.
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The effect of World War II is one point worth noting. Almost every victim of lynching since the war has been a veteran. The Negro community is probably more unified today, more politically vehement, more aggressive in its demand for full citizenship- even in the South- than at any other time in history. Roughly one million Negroes entered the armed services. They moved around and saw things; they were exposed to danger and learned what their rights were; overseas, many were treated decently and democratically by whites for the first time in their lives; the consequent fermentations have been explosive. Also since Negroes were presumably fighting for democratic principles on the international plane, it was difficult to keep them from wondering why the same principles were not applied at home. It wasn't easy for an intelligent Negro to accept that he was fighting for democracy- in a largely Jim Crow army. The glaring crudity of this paradox became the more striking as the war went on. One famous remark is that of the Negro soldier returning across the Pacific from Okinawa. "Our fight for freedom," he said, "begins when we get to San Francisco."
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Famously the South is the land of demagogues, of cumulus-cloudy politicians who emit wads of opaque cotton every time they open their mouths. Think back a little, to the time when men now mostly forgotten were household names- "Cotton Ed" Smith of South Carolina, who was probably the worst senator who ever lived, no mean honor; Tom Watson of Georgia and Tom Heflin of Alabama, one of the most fanatic reactionaries in American history, especially about things religious; John Sharp Williams of Mississippi, Cole L. Blease of South Carolina, one of the typical "spittoon senators," and of course Huey Long of Louisiana.
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