Why a Town Is Finally Honoring a Black Veteran Attacked by Its Police Chief

By Audra D.S. Burch

Sgt. Isaac Woodard Jr., who was blinded during a brutal beating by the police in South Carolina, with his mother in 1946. Credit – Special Collections and Archives/Georgia State University Library

It was a racial assault so vicious that it became one of the early chords of the civil rights movement, and led to the desegregation of the military.

Sgt. Isaac Woodard Jr., 26, was a decorated African-American veteran. He had just been honorably discharged from the United States Army in 1946 and was headed home to Winnsboro, S.C. Still in uniform, Mr. Woodard, was forcibly removed from the bus, brutally beaten and jailed by the white police chief in the town of Batesburg.

But in the small town where Mr. Woodard was beaten so severely that he lost his sight, the crime went unpunished and largely faded from memory. Almost three generations later, a black Army veteran in Georgia and a white federal judge in South Carolina separately stumbled upon Mr. Woodard’s story and vowed to honor his memory….

“Here is this hero that so many people have forgotten or didn’t know about,” said Don North, a former Army major from Carrollton, Ga., who spent three years researching and raising money for the marker. “This is about remembering him, what he endured and the legacy he left behind….”

“There were multiple episodes of black veterans abused across the South,” said Judge Richard Gergel, the federal judge who began researching Mr. Woodard’s history in 2011. “They were serving their country, fighting for American liberty and freedom and not given liberty and freedom when they came back home….”

Robert Young, 81, Mr. Woodard’s nephew and main caretaker, said that for some time his uncle was understandably bitter about what had happened. “But at some point, he just tried to live his life,” he said. “I still have this wonderful memory of him coming home for a break before he went overseas. He was standing in the kitchen in his Army uniform and my mom and sister were so excited to see him. He had made us proud.”

On Saturday, a group of town leaders, African-American and disabled veterans as well as Mr. Young and Mr. Gergel, who are meeting in person for the first time, will walk the two blocks through downtown and past the remnants of what Mr. Woodard likely last saw before being robbed of his eyesight: the railroad station, a drugstore, a hardware store.

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