The civil rights activist Modjeska Simkins described an encounter with police chief Bull Connor that same year. After Connor and his force broke up a biannual meeting of the Southern Negro Youth Congress, Simkins and other SNYC leaders went to Connor’s office on a Saturday to protest the way they had been treated. “As we went in, I guess that about thirteen white men were coming out,” Simkins recalled. “This is 1946. And we went in there to see old Bull and he gave us no satisfaction. He said, ‘You see those folks that just walked out of here? That’s a leader from the Klan and they assured me that they would give me all the help I need.’ ”7
Perhaps this was why Jim Baggett had tried to lower my expectations when I’d started looking into my father’s brush with the Birmingham police. Though the killing of a half dozen black veterans in and around Birmingham by law enforcement had been widely reported over the years, the victims’ names had rarely appeared in news stories or police reports. In fact, throughout the forties, blacks were rarely mentioned in white-owned newspapers, except when they committed crimes or there was extraordinary news to report about the black social or business elite. There was, however, a stark exception the week my father was shot.
Belvin and Woodrow Norris had their confrontation with the police on February 7, during the same six-week period when the six black veterans were allegedly murdered. After one night in jail they were released on Friday, February 8. And since their father, Belvin senior, always came home with a newspaper tucked under his arm, whether he was returning from work or from the shopping district, his two sons would have seen the headline in the Birmingham News when they picked up the evening paper on Saturday, February 9: EX-MARINE IS SLAIN, MOTORMAN INJURED IN STREETCAR ROW. The subhead explained, “Finding of justifiable homicide ruled in shooting of Negro by Police Chief.”
A recently discharged black marine named Timothy Hood had reportedly moved the “segregation sign” separating the white and “colored” sections of a streetcar. When the motorman told him to stop, the ex-marine refused, and the two began to fight. As policemen arrived, the ex-marine fled and was later apprehended. While Timothy Hood sat in the back of the police car, he was shot in the head by the police chief of Brighton, a small city just outside Birmingham. Chief G. B. Fant would later explain that he lived near where the incident occurred and had responded because he’d heard a ruckus outside his home. Fant said he shot Hood because the ex-marine had made a sudden motion. Less than twenty-four hours later, Timothy Hood’s death was ruled a justifiable killing.
The shooting of Timothy Hood only instances an epidemic of violence against black veterans in 1946 across the United States. Grisly news throughout the country dramatized the rough embrace of black soldiers after the war. That same February, a twenty-one-year-old navy veteran was flogged by a group of nine men near the Atlanta municipal airport.8 Racial violence was not confined to the South, either. There was, for example, a triple shooting in Freeport, Long Island. Four Ferguson brothers were out on the town for a reunion. Richard Ferguson was an army veteran. Charles Ferguson, after returning from overseas duty, had just reenlisted. Joseph Ferguson was in the navy, serving as a ship’s cook, third class. The fourth brother, Alonzo, was a civilian. When they were refused service at a coffee shop, they protested but left without incident. The coffee shop manager called the police to complain and warn about “misbehaving negroes”; shortly after that, the brothers were arrested by a white patrolman named Joseph Romeika.
According to eyewitnesses and court testimony, the four were lined up against a brick wall. When two of the brothers questioned their treatment, they were kicked in the groin. Two of the brothers, Charles and Alonzo Ferguson, were shot and killed by Romeika. Joseph Ferguson, the ship’s cook, was shot in the shoulder. Though the rookie police officer claimed self-defense, his story was later dismissed by the U.S Navy, after it was determined that the victims had been unarmed when they were shot.
While New York governor Thomas Dewey was pressured to name a special prosecutor, black civil rights leader A. Philip Randolph kept bearing down on President Truman to show leadership by banning segregation in the armed forces. “I found Negroes not wanting to shoulder a gun for democracy abroad unless they get democracy at home,” he told the New York Times on March 23, 1948. He asked the NAACP’s legal committee to submit several amendments for incorporation into H.R. 4278, a pending bill advocating universal military training (UMT). Specifically, the amendments called for (1) prohibition of segregation and racial discrimination in all UMT programs; (2) a ban of discrimination and all racial segregation “in interstate travel for trainees in the UMT uniforms or any other military uniform”; (3) “making attacks on, or lynching of, a trainee in UMT uniform or a person in any other military uniform a federal offense”; (4) “banning the poll tax in federal elections for any trainee otherwise eligible to vote.”9
An arm of the American Veterans Committee passed a resolution calling for a federal law to help protect black veterans: “Whereas, some 60 Negro soldiers were murdered in this country at the hands of irate fellow Americans … and, whereas the Department of Justice has not sought prosecution in a single case, moreover, the attorney general has declared himself helpless to proceed in such prosecutions: Be it resolved that the National Planning Committee of the American Veterans Committee recognizes the need of a federal law making an assault upon a man or a woman in uniform a federal offense.” The resolution gained little support, and violence against black veterans continued for the rest of the year.10
In March, newspapers across the country carried stories about a race riot in Columbia, Tennessee, provoked by a fight between a black navy veteran and a white salesclerk. Ten people, including four white police officers, were wounded in the outbreak, and two black men were killed in a shooting inside the jail later that week.
In June, an army veteran named Etoy Fletcher was seized by four men, dragged into the woods, and beaten severely after he tried to register to vote in Brandon, Mississippi. After Fletcher filed a complaint with the police, Mississippi senator Theodore Bilbo, in a broadcast campaign speech, called on every “red-blooded Anglo-Saxon man in Mississippi to resort to any means to keep hundreds of Negroes from the polls.”11
In July, two black men, one of them a World War II veteran, were lined up near a secluded bridge in Monroe, Georgia, along with their wives, and shot dead by a large group of white men. The New York Times described the shooting as a massacre. The local coroner said that at least sixty bullets had been fired into the bodies of the two men and their wives. The women were sisters and had allegedly been killed because one had recognized a member of the mob.12
Among these incidents, one in particular stands out because its savage brutality sent shock waves across the country and eventually had an impact on President Truman’s assessment of race issues in the military. The incident occurred less than a week after my father was shot. On the night of February 13, 1946, a black veteran, still wearing his uniform, was blinded by a South Carolina policeman hours after being discharged from the army. Isaac Woodard was twenty-seven years old and had just served fifteen months in the South Pacific. On February 12 he was discharged from Camp Gordon, in Georgia, and boarded a Greyhound bus to meet his wife and family in Winnsboro, South Carolina, where he was born. After the bus crossed over from Georgia into South Carolina, Woodard told bus driver A. C. Blackwell that he needed more time during a scheduled restroom stop. This request annoyed Blackwell, who claimed that he took particular offense at Woodard’s saying he needed to “take a piss.”
Later, Blackwell would explain that he told the veteran to sit down and be quiet, a command Woodard ignored. “God damn it,” Woodard allegedly responded. “Talk to me like I’m talking to you. I’m a man just like you.” The bus driver called ahead for police assistance, and two officers, Chief Lynwood Shull and Elliot Long, were waiting for Woodard when the Greyhound pulled into the sleepy hamlet of Batesburg, at the intersection of Granite and Railroad. When Woodard disemba
rked, they allegedly took him by the arm and led him to an alley around the corner from the bus stop.13
Woodard described what happened next in an affidavit:
They didn’t give me a chance to explain. The policeman struck me with a billy across my head and told me to shut up. After that the policeman grabbed me by my left arm and twisted it behind my back. I think he was trying to make me resist. I did not resist against him. He asked me, “Was I discharged?” And I told him, “Yes.” When I said yes that is when he started beating me with a billy, hitting me across the top of the head. After that I grabbed his billy and wrung it out of his hand. Another policeman came up and drew his gun on me and told me to drop the billy or he’d drop me so I dropped the billy. After I dropped the billy, the second policeman held his gun on me while the other one was beating me. He knocked me unconscious. After I commenced to come to myself he yelled get up. I started to get up, he started punching me in my eyes with the end of the billy. When I finally got up he pushed me inside the jail house and locked me up. I woke up the next morning and could not see.14
The “billy” was of course a billy club—a nightstick loaded with lead pellets.
The testimony of others involved in the Batesburg incident differs from Woodard’s. The bus driver said Woodard had been drinking and had offended his fellow passengers with his profanity, a charge Woodard and several others on the bus denied.15 And though Woodard testified that he was struck in the eyes time and again by the nightstick, Chief Shull, who at first denied the charge, admitted to having administered a “single blow.” “I’m sorry I hit him in the eye and blinded him,” Shull told the jury at his trial that November. Shull said he’d had to act fast and did not have time “to pick a place to hit” Woodard. “I had no wish to blind anyone,” Shull said. “I had no intention of hitting him in the eye, but I had to [hit] him in self defense because he was advancing on me.” Shull also allowed that he might unwittingly have stuck a finger in Woodard’s eye.
The full extent of Woodard’s injuries was made public in December 1946 when a prisoner awaiting execution tried to bequeath his eyes to the blinded soldier. “I have a good pair of eyes which I want Isaac Woodard to have,” wrote William H. Copeland from his jail cell.16 At the behest of the NAACP, a team of prominent physicians examined Woodard for more than three hours to determine if a transplant was possible. Dr. Henry Gowens, who led the team, issued the findings that were reported in the Pittsburgh Courier. Woodard’s eyeballs were pulverized, the report said, leaving only the tiniest piece of cornea in each eye, and no reaction in either. The nerve head of each had been destroyed; there was no light perception.
The report concluded, “There is absolutely no possibility of Woodard regaining his sight by the transferral of the eyes from Mr. Copeland.” Instead, it was suggested that “the eyes should be cleaned out thoroughly and a gold ball placed in each socket. This would prepare him for plastic eyes.”17
At twenty-seven years old, Woodard had been blinded for life. During the first weeks after the incident, there was little mention of it outside South Carolina. But when the NAACP’s head office got involved, the story soon became a national sensation. Black newspapers across the country unleashed a torrent of outrage in their editorial pages. And Orson Welles used his radio broadcast to vent his anger in a series of blistering editorials, beginning in September and lasting through the fall of 1946.
“What does it cost to be a Negro?” Welles asked. “In Aiken, South Carolina, it cost a man his eyes. What does it cost to wear over your skeleton the pinkish tint officially described as white? In Aiken, South Carolina, it costs a man his soul.” Welles would eventually correct himself and note that the blinding of the black veteran had taken place in Batesburg, but he was unapologetic in his zeal to bring to justice the men who had wielded the nightsticks. After the NAACP brought the case to his attention, he threatened to hunt down the police officer who’d blinded Woodard and spread his name over the airwaves.
“Officer X, I’m talking to you,” Welles bellowed from the radio, the dramatic roar arresting in its intensity, especially by today’s broadcast standards. Welles’s commentaries on Isaac Woodard expressed genuine, unfiltered outrage:
Wash your hands, Officer X, wash them well. Scrub and scully. You won’t blot out the blood of a blinded war veteran. Now yet the color of your skin, your own skin, you’ll never, never, never change it. Wash your hands, Officer X. Wash a lifetime, you’ll never wash away that leprous lack of pigment, the guilty pallor of the White Man. We invite you to luxuriate in secrecy. It will be brief. Go on. Suck on your anonymous moment while it lasts. You’re going to be uncovered. We will blast out your name. We’ll give the world your given name, Officer X. Yes, and your so-called Christian name, it’s going to rise out of the filthy deep like the dead thing it is. We’re going to make it public with a public scandal you dictated but failed to sign.
A few weeks later, Welles made good on his promise to cast a harsh national spotlight on Shull. “I promised I’d hunt him down. I have. I gave my word. I see him unmasked. I have unmasked him. I am going to haunt Police Chief Shull for all the rest of his natural life. Mr. Shull is not going to forget me. And what’s more important, I’m not going to let you forget, Mr. Shull.”18
Welles vowed to keep that spotlight on Shull, a small-town sheriff who worked in a building that was not much larger than a four-bedroom house:
I’ll never lose you. If they try you, I’m going to watch the trial. If they jail you, I’m going to wait for your first day of freedom. You won’t be free of me. I want to see who’s waiting for you at the prison gates. I want to know who will acknowledge that they know you. I’m interested in your future. I will take careful note of all your destinations; assume another name and I will be careful that the name you would forget is not forgotten. I will find means to remove from you all refuge, Officer X, you can’t get rid of me. We have an appointment, you and I, and only death can cancel it.
Not the appointment but Welles’s program was canceled. After Welles ignored several pleas from ABC to desist from his unyielding campaign and offended several sponsors by sympathizing with civil rights and Communist-leaning organizations, his show was pulled from the airwaves. Soon thereafter, Welles fled America for Europe, partly to escape questioning by the House Un-American Activities Committee.
But his blistering focus on the fate of Isaac Woodard led others to take up the cause: folksinger Woody Guthrie and calypso artist Lord Invader both wrote songs in the serviceman’s honor. Woodard traveled the country, raising thousands of dollars for the NAACP.
Even as Welles had begun his instigation in September, NAACP executive secretary Walter White had presented the Woodard case to President Harry Truman, who’d expressed shock and dismay that South Carolina had failed to investigate the case aggressively. Within a week, at Truman’s insistence, the Justice Department stepped in. Within a month, Shull and the other officer had been indicted.19 The national outcry was so strong that even some South Carolina newspapers chastised the governor for not having conducted the investigation with greater alacrity. The case went to trial in November; after less than an hour of jury deliberation, Shull was found innocent on all charges. Spectators in the courtroom hooted and cheered. Woodard, according to news accounts, wept openly “through what remained of his shattered eyes.”
Woodard went to a school for the blind in Connecticut and later moved to New York, where he used money raised in his behalf by the NAACP to purchase an apartment building. Though he aspired to become an entrepreneur, Woodard quickly fell on hard times. His wife left him, and he had a few run-ins with the law for fighting and petty theft. He lived in relative obscurity, though for weeks his blinding had been front-page news. He died on September 23, 1992, largely ignored by the media, despite the importance of his ordeal to the civil rights struggle.
Woodard’s case provoked President Truman to name a commission on civil rights in December 1946, just weeks after Shull’s acquittal.
That commission produced the landmark report To Secure These Rights, which, among other things, recommended the end of segregation in the armed forces. Truman was clearly moved by the Woodard case. In a letter to his friend and fellow World War I veteran Ernest Roberts, he wrote, “When a Mayor and a City Marshal can take a Negro Sergeant off a bus in South Carolina, beat him up and put out one of his eyes, and nothing is done about it by State Authorities, something is radically wrong with the system.”20
In another letter, this one to Charles G. Bolte, chairman of the American Veterans Committee—the group that pushed to make crimes against uniformed servicemen and servicewomen federal offenses—the president wrote, “We have only recently completed a long and bitter war against intolerance in other lands. A cruel price in blood and suffering was paid by the American people in bringing that war to a successful conclusion. Yet, in this country today there exists disturbing evidence of intolerance and prejudice similar in kind, though perhaps not in degree, to that against which we fought in the war.”21
Nearly two years after he was presented with the Woodard case, in July 1948, and despite stiff opposition from top military officers, Truman enacted Executive Order 9981, outlawing racial discrimination in the armed forces by ensuring “equality of treatment and opportunity for all persons in the armed services without regard to race, color, religion or national origin.”
From Uncle Joe I’ve learned that the Norris men paid close attention to all news involving blacks in the military—from the push for equal access to G.I. benefits to the violence waged against black veterans determined to secure their civil rights. They hung on every word about these matters in newspapers and on radio. My father and grandfather were big Orson Welles fans. When I was a teenager, my father made me stay at home one Sunday evening to listen to a rebroadcast of The War of the Worlds. While I pouted about missing some outing with my cousins, he sat riveted to the edge of his seat, as if listening to the broadcast for the first time. It is hard to imagine that he would not have heard Welles’s blistering screeds against the police officer who blinded Woodard only days after he himself had been shot.
The Grace of Silence Page 12