[NARRATOR:] For the GIs discharged just hours earlier,
the wait inside the Greyhound bus terminal was excruciating.
They were on the final leg of a journey
that had taken them halfway around the world and back.
Freedom was so close they could nearly taste it.
[LAURA WILLIAMS, WOODARD’S GREAT-NIECE:] The soldiers that were there,
they had to have been jubilant and proud.
Happy to return home, on your soil.
So, it had to have been just an exciting time for all of them
to go home and see their families, finally.
[NARRATOR:] On the eight o’clock Augusta to Columbia coach that night
was Sergeant Isaac Woodard,
heading home to Winnsboro, South Carolina,
to see his wife for the first time in several years.
Woodard was still in uniform,
carrying a battle star for bravery under fire,
and a final paycheck from the US Army
in the extraordinary sum of $695.
Enough to start the kind of life
he hadn’t dared dream of before the war.
Like the other 900,000 African-American soldiers returning home from duty,
Isaac Woodard had come to see this bright new future as his due.
[KENNETH MACK, HISTORIAN:] African Americans had fought in all of the major wars in American history,
and there's always been this theme of
if we fight and we show our loyalty,
then we are going to advance
and be recognized as more equal citizens,
and that dream had always been frustrated.
But World War II was actually quite different from past wars for African Americans
because it was a special kind of war.
[SHERRILYN IFILL, PRESIDENT, NAACP LEGAL DEFENSE FUND:] This war, this particular war, crystalizes
around the idea of this fight against fascism, and that means that it is a fight against
inequality, of suppressing groups of people because of their race.
So you have black soldiers coming home, having been inculcated with the idea that America
stands for something different than fascism, something different than racial and ethnic discrimination.
Something better.
[NARRATOR:] By 10 o’clock on that February evening, Isaac Woodard was little more than
an hour away from his homecoming in Winnsboro.
[RAWN JAMES, AUTHOR:] The atmosphere on the bus is jovial, filled with the relief that
soldiers feel after surviving 15 months at war.
Black soldiers and white soldiers are talking together, joking together.
Eventually a bottle of whiskey gets opened and passed around.
[RICHARD GERGEL, AUTHOR, UNEXAMPLED COURAGE:] There were a few non-soldiers on the bus and
they were very uncomfortable with the interaction between the white and Black soldiers.
There were complaints to the bus driver and the bus driver didn't like it.
[KARI FREDERICKSON, HISTORIAN:] There are, of course in 1946, no bathroom facilities
on public buses.
Isaac Woodard asked the bus driver, um, if at the next stop he could be allowed to disembark
and to go to the bathroom.
[RAWN JAMES, AUTHOR:] And the bus driver tells him: “Boy, go sit back down.”
[KARI FREDERICKSON, HISTORIAN:] The bus driver cursed him.
Isaac Woodard cursed him back.
And proclaimed his manhood.
[LAURA WILLIAMS, WOODARD’S GREAT-NIECE:] He just said to the gentleman, you know, you
don't have to speak to me in that manner, I'm a man just like you.
In other words, give me respect.
[RAWN JAMES, AUTHOR:] Military training and service turned a Black man from the rural
deep South with a fifth grade education into a man willing to say words that he knew
could put his life at risk.
There is no doubt when he said that, that he was under any illusions about what he was
saying, where he was saying it — on a bus at night, in the Deep South.
But he was a veteran.
He was wearing the uniform.
He was surrounded by veterans who were wearing the uniforms.
They were returning from a war that they had won.
And he was a stronger man because of it.
[RICHARD GERGEL, AUTHOR, UNEXAMPLED COURAGE:] The bus driver is furious.
At the next town he goes looking for a police officer to have Woodard removed from his bus.
Woodard's kind of perplexed.
He steps off the bus and as he's trying to explain himself, the police chief brings out
his blackjack, which is like a baton, but it's spring-loaded and it, it has tremendous
force, and hits Woodard over the head with it.
[NARRATOR:] A soldier aboard the bus watched as the officer took Woodard by the arm and
forced him around the corner and out of sight.
“That is the last I saw of him,” he would tell investigators a few months later.
[ROBERT YOUNG, WOODARD’S NEPHEW:] They started beating him all across the head.
And they gouge his eyes out.
They didn't beat them out.
They put the stick in there and twisted it.
They threw him in jail and he told me they poured whiskey over him to say he was drunk.
He was arrested for, supposedly, disorderly conduct, disturbing the peace and being drunk.
He was not drunk.
He was not being disorderly.
And he did not disturb the peace.
[KARI FREDERICKSON, HISTORIAN:] He spends the night in jail, unable to see.
In excruciating pain.
The next morning he is taken to the judge.
He is levied a fine, but he can't see to sign the paperwork that is put before him.
Ultimately, when Woodard is examined by specialists they determine that he will never see again.
The injuries are severe and they are irreversible.
He will be blind for life.
[ROBERT YOUNG, WOODARD’S NEPHEW:] You spend 42 months in the military, overseas in the
Philippines and you come home to this.
How can you just gouge someone's eyes out?
Anybody, how can...you can't do that.
And it hurts me to even think about it, but it happened.
It’s sad.
Well, that was, I’d say, a part of ignorance.
You know, that's the bottom line, plain ignorance.