American Experience The Blinding of Isaac Woodard

The Blinding of Isaac Woodard: How a horrific incident of racial violence became a powerful catalyst for the civil rights movement. 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 film 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 jump-started the modern civil rights movement.