The Grace of Silence (16 page)

The report concluded, “There is absolutely no possibility of Woodard regaining his sight by the transferral of the eyes from Mr. Copeland.” Instead, it was suggested that “the eyes should be cleaned out thoroughly and a gold ball placed in each socket. This would prepare him for plastic eyes.”
¹⁷

At twenty-seven years old, Woodard had been blinded for life. During the first weeks after the incident, there was little mention of it outside South Carolina. But when the NAACP’s head office got involved, the story soon became a national sensation. Black newspapers across the country unleashed a torrent of outrage in their editorial pages. And Orson Welles used his radio broadcast to vent his anger in a series of blistering editorials, beginning in September and lasting through the fall of 1946.

“What does it cost to be a Negro?” Welles asked. “In Aiken, South Carolina, it cost a man his eyes. What does it cost to wear
over your skeleton the pinkish tint officially described as white? In Aiken, South Carolina, it costs a man his soul.” Welles would eventually correct himself and note that the blinding of the black veteran had taken place in Batesburg, but he was unapologetic in his zeal to bring to justice the men who had wielded the nightsticks. After the NAACP brought the case to his attention, he threatened to hunt down the police officer who’d blinded Woodard and spread his name over the airwaves.

“Officer X, I’m talking to you,” Welles bellowed from the radio, the dramatic roar arresting in its intensity, especially by today’s broadcast standards. Welles’s commentaries on Isaac Woodard expressed genuine, unfiltered outrage:

A few weeks later, Welles made good on his promise to cast a harsh national spotlight on Shull. “I promised I’d hunt him down. I have. I gave my word. I see him unmasked. I have unmasked him. I am going to haunt Police Chief Shull for all the rest of his natural life. Mr. Shull is not going to forget me. And what’s more important, I’m not going to let you forget, Mr. Shull.”
¹⁸

Welles vowed to keep that spotlight on Shull, a small-town
sheriff who worked in a building that was not much larger than a four-bedroom house:

Not the appointment but Welles’s program was canceled. After Welles ignored several pleas from ABC to desist from his unyielding campaign and offended several sponsors by sympathizing with civil rights and Communist-leaning organizations, his show was pulled from the airwaves. Soon thereafter, Welles fled America for Europe, partly to escape questioning by the House Un-American Activities Committee.

But his blistering focus on the fate of Isaac Woodard led others to take up the cause: folksinger Woody Guthrie and calypso artist Lord Invader both wrote songs in the serviceman’s honor. Woodard traveled the country, raising thousands of dollars for the NAACP.

Even as Welles had begun his instigation in September, NAACP executive secretary Walter White had presented the Woodard case to President Harry Truman, who’d expressed shock and dismay that South Carolina had failed to investigate the case aggressively. Within a week, at Truman’s insistence, the Justice Department stepped in. Within a month, Shull and the other officer had been indicted.
¹⁹
The national outcry was so strong that even some South Carolina newspapers chastised the governor for not having conducted the investigation
with greater alacrity. The case went to trial in November; after less than an hour of jury deliberation, Shull was found innocent on all charges. Spectators in the courtroom hooted and cheered. Woodard, according to news accounts, wept openly “through what remained of his shattered eyes.”

Woodard went to a school for the blind in Connecticut and later moved to New York, where he used money raised in his behalf by the NAACP to purchase an apartment building. Though he aspired to become an entrepreneur, Woodard quickly fell on hard times. His wife left him, and he had a few run-ins with the law for fighting and petty theft. He lived in relative obscurity, though for weeks his blinding had been front-page news. He died on September 23, 1992, largely ignored by the media, despite the importance of his ordeal to the civil rights struggle.

Woodard’s case provoked President Truman to name a commission on civil rights in December 1946, just weeks after Shull’s acquittal. That commission produced the landmark report
To Secure These Rights
, which, among other things, recommended the end of segregation in the armed forces. Truman was clearly moved by the Woodard case. In a letter to his friend and fellow World War I veteran Ernest Roberts, he wrote, “When a Mayor and a City Marshal can take a Negro Sergeant off a bus in South Carolina, beat him up and put out one of his eyes, and nothing is done about it by State Authorities, something is radically wrong with the system.”
²⁰

In another letter, this one to Charles G. Bolte, chairman of the American Veterans Committee—the group that pushed to make crimes against uniformed servicemen and servicewomen federal offenses—the president wrote, “We have only recently completed a long and bitter war against intolerance in other lands. A cruel price in blood and suffering was paid by the American people in bringing that war to a successful conclusion.
Yet, in this country today there exists disturbing evidence of intolerance and prejudice similar in kind, though perhaps not in degree, to that against which we fought in the war.”
²¹

Nearly two years after he was presented with the Woodard case, in July 1948, and despite stiff opposition from top military officers, Truman enacted Executive Order 9981, outlawing racial discrimination in the armed forces by ensuring “equality of treatment and opportunity for all persons in the armed services without regard to race, color, religion or national origin.”

From Uncle Joe I’ve learned that the Norris men paid close attention to all news involving blacks in the military—from the push for equal access to G.I. benefits to the violence waged against black veterans determined to secure their civil rights. They hung on every word about these matters in newspapers and on radio. My father and grandfather were big Orson Welles fans. When I was a teenager, my father made me stay at home one Sunday evening to listen to a rebroadcast of
The War of the Worlds
. While I pouted about missing some outing with my cousins, he sat riveted to the edge of his seat, as if listening to the broadcast for the first time. It is hard to imagine that he would not have heard Welles’s blistering screeds against the police officer who blinded Woodard only days after he himself had been shot.

What must it have been like to pick up the paper and read about scandalous violence against black men who had fought for human rights abroad? News stories covered the murder of army veteran John C. Jones, who was tortured to death with a blowtorch and meat cleaver in Minden, Louisiana, and the shooting of army veteran George Dorsey along with his wife, sister, and brother-in-law in Monroe, Georgia. That my father’s brush with Birmingham law enforcement occurred in
1946, a year when violence against black veterans raged across the land and in his own hometown, deepened the mystery of his silence about the event.

I’ve since spoken to black World War II veterans who, like Belvin Norris, endured slights and indignities while and after serving their country. To a man, they’d kept their stories to themselves, refusing to discuss them with their lovers or their wives, their children or coworkers or fellow church members. Tales of bitterness or victimization did not jibe with the narratives of themselves they’d created. As I delved deeper into the matter, I was consumed by anger and confusion: not only because I’d been deprived of my father’s story but because the collective story of the black World War II veteran had been slighted in the popular history of the period.

Every February, when Black History Month rolls around, the country honors black achievement in newspapers and magazines, on TV shows and in schools. These tributes tend to focus on a time line that starts with slavery and fast-forwards to the mid-fifties through the mid-sixties, as if Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass passed the baton directly to Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. The civil rights icon Julian Bond has said that the protest for equal rights by black World War II veterans and the blinding of Isaac Woodard marked the beginning of the modern-day civil rights movement. You would hardly know it, judging from the scant attention given to these events.

The treatment of black veterans during and after World War II is a hard truth for America to embrace. Unlike the civil rights struggles of the sixties, which enshrined clear-cut heroes and villains, discrimination suffered by black veterans challenges the country’s core values, the offending party being the federal government itself, which had insisted on its moral authority in the fight against xenophobia overseas. This is perhaps why Black History Month emphasizes the Martin Luther
King era—its marches, sit-ins, and protests—even as it all but ignores the earlier struggles of men and women who worked hard to underscore the country’s untenable moral contradiction. The story of these men and women instances a special brand of grace: they had every reason to stoke their anger at America but chose instead to seek a higher ground. While they hoped for and, in some cases, demanded the right to vote, fair wages, and equal housing, they were also asserting a much more basic claim. They wanted the right simply to be ordinary: to be able to walk into a Woolworth’s, order a ham sandwich, and savor it on the spot; to be able to fly a kite with a son or daughter anywhere in a park without fear of retribution; to be able to pass a white woman on the street without her trampling on their pride by clutching her pocketbook a little closer or, worse, threatening their lives by crying disrespect.

Chances are you’ve encountered these veterans, men and women, at work or church or Walmart without knowing it. And probably, like me before I started writing this book, you knew little if anything about their sacrifices and triumphs in the quest for a better America.

On the frigid Tuesday morning of Inauguration Day 2009, old black men in uniform made their way to Washington, D.C., to witness the nation’s first black president, the commander in chief, taking the oath of office. Many were clutching old photographs of themselves and others during their service, or had pictures in small frames or encased in plastic, taped or pinned to their lapels or winter hats. I hosted National Public Radio’s live coverage that day with my colleague Steve Inskeep. I usually host in the afternoon, but on that day I had to keep Steve’s early morning hours. At 4:45 a.m. on January 20, I encountered a stooped old man in a tan triangular army hat on Massachusetts Avenue. He was inching, slow as molasses, on his way to
the Capitol, but he lifted himself upright and leaned against a younger man who could have been his son to salute me as I passed. “I can barely walk, but I am going to be standing proud today,” he said, his words punctuated by puffs of condensation in the predawn cold. “Stand all day if I have to, to see this.”

I wondered if he was actually going to make it to the Capitol grounds to see the ceremony, not only because he moved so slowly but because he seemed to pause and salute almost every person he met on the street. The distance that stooped old gentleman had already traveled had once been unimaginable: from when, as a young man, he first put on his army cap to this morning, when he pulled it over his now graying hair to watch a black man raise his hand to take the oath of office as president of the United States. Eric Holder, soon to become the attorney general, told me that all day he harbored thoughts of his father, an immigrant from Barbados who fiercely loved the United States and fought in the war but who, on his way home, had to stand for hours on end during his train ride, while German prisoners of war, all white men, sat comfortably in cushioned seats.

January 20, by tradition, is the day American presidents take the oath of office. January 20, 1946, was my father’s last full day in the navy; he was discharged on the following morning. I, too, thought of my father on Inauguration Day, wondering what he would have made of the ascension of a black president of the United States, a black commander in chief. The answer brought tears to my eyes.

THE MAN ACCUSED OF BLINDING
Isaac Woodard, Police Chief Lynwood Shull, pretty much disappeared from the historical record after his acquittal in November 1946. He stayed in and around Batesburg for most of his life. He had a daughter and worked for a time as the county road commissioner. He died in December 1997, at the age of ninety-five. Eager to know more about him, I called up some of his relatives: not a one had a clue that Lynwood Shull had been a figure in the national news for his involvement in the Woodard case. They had no idea that Shull had been the subject of a series of radio tirades by Orson Welles, the creator of
Citizen Kane
and
The War of the Worlds
. Most were dumbfounded to discover that their relative had been accused of a crime so heinous as to prompt executive action by a sitting U.S. president. Some were eager to get me off the phone, but others wanted to hear more.