An honourably discharged Black soldier was blinded by police hours after service

Evidence

Georgia pines flew past the windows of the Greyhound bus carrying Isaac Woodard home to Winnsboro, South Carolina. After serving four years in the army in World War II, where he had earned a battle star, he had received an honorable discharge earlier that day at Camp Gordon and was headed home to meet his wife. When the bus stopped at a small drugstore an hour outside Atlanta, Woodard asked the white driver if he could go to the restroom and a brief argument ensued. About half an hour later, the driver stopped again and told Woodard to get off the bus. Crisp in his uniform, Woodard stepped from the stairs and saw white police waiting for him. Before he could speak, one of the officers struck him in the head with a billy club, then continued to beat him so badly that he fell unconscious. The blows to Woodard’s head were so severe that when he woke in a jail cell the next day, he could not see. The beating occurred just four and a half hours after the soldier’s military discharge. At twenty-six, Woodard would never see again. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 156

Categorization

• XREF: The brutalization of returning Black veterans echoes the Flowers case in 1965 that motivated the Voting Rights Act — a recurring pattern of treating military service as no shield from racial violence.
• SEED: Angles on how police blindness was used as a deliberate punishment marker — blinding as a recurring motif in US racial violence.