Supporters want marker for black vet

COLUMBIA, S.C. — Hours after leaving military service behind in 1946, a decorated African-american World War II veteran still wearing his uniform was removed from a Greyhound bus while heading home, beaten by a white South Carolina police chief and left permanently blind.

Sgt. Isaac Woodard’s brutal encounter with the small-town police official horrified many Americans and prompted cries for justice on behalf of the 26-year-old former soldier. His case even helped spur President Harry Truman’s drive to integrate the U.S. military beginning in 1948.

Now, Woodard’s supporters are seeking to erect a civil rights marker honoring him in the town where he was attacked, saying his ferocious beating helped draw U.S. attention to the discrimination and mistreatment of blacks returning home from war.

He deserves recognition for his place in the struggle for civil rights, they say.

Historians say Woodard’s case — and the outcry it prompted — drove the first cracks into American segregation years ahead of the civil rights era.

Shortly after Woodard was honorably discharged from the Army, he was beaten repeatedly and blinded in February 1946 by white police Chief Lynwood Shull in Batesburg, South Carolina. The beating drew the attention of the NAACP, whose representatives met with Truman to discuss the treatment of African-american troops returning to American society.

After little was done about Woodard’s beating for eight months, federal prosecutors ultimately charged Shull with violating Woodard’s civil rights. An all-white jury took less than 30 minutes to find the chief not guilty.

“I was no harsher than was necessary to complete the arrest,” the police chief told The Associated Press in 1946.

Woodard lived in the Bronx, New York, for the remainder of his life and died in 1992 at age 73.

His supporters now want to erect a historical marker in Woodard’s honor in Batesburg-leesville, a community of about 5,000 people west of Columbia where Woodard was assaulted.

Former Army Maj. Don North of Carrollton, Georgia, is leading that move. He said he wants the marker to include a Braille inscription in a nod to Woodard’s blindness. North said he was given approval by the South Carolina Historical Marker Program to erect the marker, and is raising money for it.