A Dangerous, Costly and Heartbreaking Process

On February 12, 1946, Isaac Woodard was returning home to North Carolina from Camp Gordon in Augusta, GA on a Greyhound bus. Woodard, a decorated veteran of the Pacific theater, asked the driver if there was time for him to use the restroom while on a scheduled stop. The driver grudgingly agreed, and the trip continued without incident until they reached Batesburg, SC, where the driver called local authorities and had Woodard arrested. What followed was one of the nation’s most heinous hate crimes, and the attack left Woodard permanently blind. Less than two weeks later in Columbia, TN, a second Black veteran who also served in the Pacitic theater, James Stephenson, was the victim of an attempted lynching after shopkeepers called police on him for allegedly disturbing the peace. It wasn’t until well-known figures like Orson Welles and Langston Hughes began to publicly call out these racist attacks committed by law enforcement that President Truman finally began to address some of the racial injustices and violence being committed across the nation, ultimately culminating in the desegregation of the military in 1948.