American Experience (1988) s33e07 Episode Script

Citizen Hearst: Part 1

1
(whirring sound)
(clicking)
WELLES:
Good morning,
this is Orson Welles speaking.
I'd like to read to you
an affidavit.
"I, Isaac Woodard Jr.,
being duly sworn do depose
"and state as follows.
"I am 27 years old and a veteran
of the United States Army,
"having served for 15 months
in the South Pacific,
"and earned one battle star.
"While I was in uniform
I purchased a ticket
"to Winnsboro, South Carolina,
and took the bus headed there
"to pick up my wife
to come to New York
"to see my father and mother.
"About one hour out of Atlanta,
the bus drivers got off
"and went and got the police.
"The policeman grabbed me
by my left arm and twisted it
"behind my back.
"I figured he was trying
to make me resist.
"I did not resist against him.
"Another policeman
held his gun on me
"while the other one
was beating me.
"I started to get up, he started
punching me in my eyes.
"He knocked me unconscious.
"I woke up next morning
and could not see.
"They took me to the
veteran's hospital
"in Columbia, South Carolina.
They told me I should join
a blind school."
RICHARD GERGEL:
You have a man
wearing a dress uniform.
He has medals on his chest.
All the symbols of sacrifice
and service are there
and it doesn't matter,
it just doesn't matter.
KARI FREDERICKSON:
To a white Southerner in 1946,
nothing is more provocative
than a Black man in uniform.
SHERRILYN IFILL:
You have law enforcement
coming with the full savagery
of Southern racism.
No one can say that
what happened to Isaac Woodard
was justified.
KENNETH MACK:
It just seemed to be something
that shouldn't happen
in America.
WELLES:
Now it seems
the officer of the law
was just another white man
with a stick
who wanted to teach
a Negro boy a lesson,
to show a Negro boy where
he belonged: in the darkness.
MACK:
Are we going to have people
who live in the United States
and are less equal than others?
What are we going to do
about this?
WELLES:
You say the North
is bullying the South.
I'm afraid you're missing
the point.
This isn't another battlefield
of the Civil War.
The sides aren't the blue
and the gray.
They are the right
and the wrong.
GERGEL:
Who would have guessed
that the blinding
of a heroic veteran
would be the beginning of the
end of Jim Crow in America?

(cheering)
NEWSREEL ANNOUNCER:
Going home
that's the sweetest words
a G.I. ever heard.
(train horn blaring)
Back to the good old U.S.A.,
where just the formality
of mustering out,
and then home sweet home.

NARRATOR:
For the G.I.s 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:
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 8:00 Augusta to Columbia
coach that night
was Sergeant Isaac Woodard,
headed home to Winnsboro,
South Carolina, to see his wife
for the first time
in several years.
(engine rumbles, crickets chirp)
Woodard was still in uniform,
carrying a battle star
for bravery under fire,
and a final paycheck
from the U.S. 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.
(gunfire, explosions)
MACK:
African Americans had fought
in all of the major wars
in American history, and there'd
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.
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.
(crickets chirping)

NARRATOR:
By 10:00 on that
February evening,
Isaac Woodard was little more
than an hour away
from his homecoming in
Winnsboro.
JAMES:
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.
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.

FREDERICKSON:
There are, of course, in 1946,
no bathroom facilities
on public buses.
Isaac Woodard asked the
bus driver if at the next stop
he could be allowed to disembark
and to go to the bathroom.
JAMES:
And the bus driver tells him,
"Boy, go sit back down."

FREDERICKSON:
The bus driver cursed him.
Isaac Woodard cursed him back
and proclaimed his manhood.
WILLIAMS:
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."
JAMES:
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.
GERGEL:
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.
(thunder rumbles)
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.

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.
FREDERICKSON:
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.

YOUNG:
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.
GERGEL:
As World War II ended,
900,000 African-American
veterans
returned to America
75% of them to the South,
most of them to the rural South.

MACK:
The war took Black soldiers
out of communities
where they had to adhere
to a certain set of social norms
in which they were subservient
and opened up possibilities.

GERGEL:
Even a segregated army
gave chances for training
and leadership,
and advancement and recognition.
(crowd cheering)
Those in Europe had been treated
very respectfully.
And for the first time
in their lives,
the color of their skin was not
the predominant
characteristic to which
they were identified.
They came home feeling
like they had done their duty
in defense of American democracy
and liberty.
But, when they returned home,
they largely saw nothing
had changed.

White Southerners of that era
considered
the returning soldiers
to be potential trouble,
not great American citizens.
As some would say,
they no longer knew their place.
MACK:
Black soldiers were especially
threatening to
the racial mores
that undermined segregation.
Black soldiers were in uniform.
They wore emblems of authority.
They often carried themselves
with a sense of authority
that the enforcers
of white supremacy
found particularly threatening.
FREDERICKSON:
Wearing the uniform
of the U.S. military
grants one the prerogatives
of citizenship.
And Black men make no bones
about the fact that they feel
completely deserving
of those prerogatives.
And they become the target.
So, in 1946, what you see
is one incident
of racial violence
after another.

NARRATOR:
There was little recourse
and little protection
for the African-American
veterans
victimized in the South.
Investigating these hate crimes
often fell to a small team
of lawyers at the
National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People,
headed by Thurgood Marshall.
SULLIVAN:
The N.A.A.C.P. is just inundated
with cases
of violence against
Black soldiers,
wrongful court martials,
massive riots, slaughter.
And Thurgood Marshall's office
had files from floor to ceiling
of these cases.

NARRATOR:
A harrowing new report landed
in the N.A.A.C.P. legal office
almost every week in 1946.
One Black Army veteran
was murdered on his front porch
in Taylor County, Georgia.
His offense had been casting a
vote in the Democratic primary.
A week later, 120 miles away,
a Black veteran was kidnapped
by a lynch mob
Along with a friend
and their two wives,
one of them reportedly
seven months pregnant.
The four were shot roughly
60 times at close range.
Eyewitness accounts reported
that the lynching party
included local police officers.


In the middle of what
Thurgood Marshall called
that "terrible" season of 1946,
Isaac Woodard walked into
the New York City offices
of N.A.A.C.P. head Walter White.
The 27-year-old South Carolina
native struck White
as polite and handsome,
with the ramrod straight bearing
of a soldier.
"I saw you, Mr. White,
when you visited my outfit
in the Pacific," he said.
"I could see then."
Woodard then sat down and
told the story of his blinding
in a sworn affidavit.
ISAAC WOODARD (dramatized):
The policeman asked me,
was I discharged?
And when I said yes,
that's 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 hands.
Another policeman came up
and threw his gun on me,
told me to drop the billy
or he'd drop me,
so I dropped the billy.
He knocked me unconscious.
He hollered, "Get up!"
When I started to get up,
he started punching me
in the eyes with the end
of his billy.
MACK:
N.A.A.C.P. officials,
they were moved by this,
like everyone was moved
by just the tragedy of it.
In addition, the N.A.A.C.P.
leadership was always
on the lookout for cases
of injustice
that they could use
to really dramatize the nature
of the Southern racial system
for African Americans
around the country,
to get them to support
the N.A.A.C.P.'s work,
and for white people
to make them understand
what's really going on.

FREDERICKSON:
Once Walter White gets a hold
of Isaac Woodard's story,
he is on fire.

He is looking for ways
to publicize this story
and he's looking for
the biggest platform out there.

WELLES:
How do you do,
ladies and gentlemen?
This is Orson Welles.
NARRATOR:
White and his new press agent
reached out
to one of the nation's
great dramatists,
the boy wonder of stage
and cinema,
31-year-old Orson Welles.
In the summer of 1946,
Welles was hosting a radio show
that broadcast nationally
every Sunday.
GERGEL:
The N.A.A.C.P. goes to him
and says, "We need your help
to share this story."

The story fascinated him,
particularly
the whodunnit quality.
No one knew who this
police officer was.
(radio hums while tuning)
WELLES:
Now it seems the officer
of the law who blinded
the young Negro boy in the
affidavit has not been named.
Till we know more about him,
for just now,
we'll call the policeman
Officer X.
Officer X, I'm talking to you.
We invite you to luxuriate
in secrecy, it will be brief.
You're going to be uncovered!
(radio hums)
NARRATOR:
Welles came back to the
Woodard story the next week,
and the week after, drawing more
listeners each episode.
But there were holes
in the story.
Three weeks into
the radio broadcasts,
there were still no real leads
about Woodard's assailant,
or even about the town
where Woodard had been pulled
from the bus.
The N.A.A.C.P. legal team
was getting nervous.
GERGEL:
Marshall says,
"We gotta get this right."
We've got our friends
out on a limb on this thing.

Orson Welles hires
private investigators to go
throughout the bus route to
figure out where this happened.
And the N.A.A.C.P.'s
national office has its lawyers
searching these communities
asking does anyone know
this story.

Arriving in, unsolicited,
in the national office
is a letter from a Black soldier
who says,
"I heard on the radio about the
blinding of Sergeant Woodard.
"I was on the bus.
It was Batesburg."
(radio tuning hisses)
WELLES:
I have before me wires
and press releases to the effect
that a policeman of Batesburg,
a man by the name of Shull,
has admitted that he was
the police officer
who blinded Isaac Woodard.
Officer X,
we know your name now.
Now that we found you out,
we'll never lose you.
You can't get rid of me.
We have an appointment.
(radio tuning hisses)

NARRATOR:
The Welles broadcast had put
the story in the headlines,
and a whirlwind began to swirl
around Isaac Woodard.

When word got out that the Army
had denied the young sergeant
full disability benefits
on the grounds that he was
blinded a few hours
after his discharge
luminaries from New York's
Black community organized
a benefit concert on his behalf.
(band playing)
Headlined by some of the biggest
names in music,
stars from Billie Holliday
to Woody Guthrie turned up
at Lewisohn Stadium in Harlem to
raise money for "the blind G.I."
(jazz band playing,
crowd cheering)
Heavyweight champion Joe Louis,
hero of Black America,
stepped forward to co-chair
the event.
YOUNG:
Joe Louis sent a limousine
to our house in the Bronx.
I was 11 years old.
That excited me.
(crowd cheering)
NARRATOR:
Seated beside his mother,
Isaac Woodard,
a young man from tiny
Winnsboro, South Carolina,
was awestruck to learn
that nearly 20,000 people
had gathered in his honor.
10,000 more were turned away.
(woman singing,
performance ending)
(crowd cheers and applause)
The crowd had been drawn
by the all-star performances,
but it was Woodard himself who
turned out to be the headliner.
One reporter noted that applause
lasted for five minutes
after he took the stage.
GERGEL:
He spoke in a very low voice
and people had to go be
completely silent to hear him,
but it was a powerful account
of what happened.

WOODARD (dramatized):
I spent three-and-a-half years
in service of my country
and thought I would be treated
as a man when I returned
to civilian life,
but I was mistaken.
If the loss of my sight
will make people in America
get together to prevent
what happened to me
from ever happening again
to any other person,
I would be glad.
(cheers and applause)

NARRATOR:
The benefit concert netted more
than $10,000 for Isaac Woodard
enough to buy a house,
but little else.
One N.A.A.C.P. staffer noted
though Woodard was riding
high now,
"in ten years no one
will remember" his name.
GERGEL:
The N.A.A.C.P. basically adopts
a plan to make Isaac Woodard
the centerpiece of a campaign
for the promotion
of the civil rights
of all returning veterans.

He goes on a multi-city
nationwide speaking tour
that gathers huge crowds
all across the country.

It's hard to imagine
how many other Black men
would have been as well known
in America in 1946 and 1947
than Isaac Woodard.

MACK:
So many victims of
Southern violence are not alive.
Their bullet-ridden corpses
are in a grave somewhere,
but he's alive to talk about
his story.

WILLIAMS:
My dad told me he remembers when
the mailman would arrive daily,
he would have a huge duffel bag
that he would carry
and the letters would just
pour out onto the floor.
MACK:
How does Isaac Woodard negotiate
this new world that he's in?
He's blinded, he's got to figure
out how to support himself
and also being called upon
to be a symbol,
where he didn't want to be
a symbol.
He just was expecting to be
discharged from the Army
and go back to his family.
(radio static)
WELLES:
The blind soldier fought for me
in this war.
The least I can do now
is fight for him.
I have eyes.
He hasn't.
I was born a white man.
And until a colored man
is a full citizen, like me,
I haven't the leisure to enjoy
the freedom that colored man
risked his life to maintain
for me.
I don't own what I have until
he owns an equal share of it.
Until somebody beats me
and blinds me,
I am in his debt.
GERGEL:
The Welles broadcast generated
huge attention.
The N.A.A.C.P. built on that
and civil rights groups
around the country were writing
letters demanding
for the prosecution
of this police officer
for the beating and blinding
of Sergeant Woodard.

FREDERICKSON:
In terms of getting justice
for Isaac Woodard,
it's going to be extremely
difficult, if not impossible.
GERGEL:
There are no prosecutions
of white police officers
by the federal government
for excessive force.
They're getting 1,000 to 2,000
complaints a year,
and they're essentially
not doing much.
MACK:
Everybody understood that
Southern state governments
did not protect
against violence.
In fact, local officials were
often the purveyors of violence.
So, there'd been calls and calls
and calls
on the federal government
to take some kind of action.
But the Department of Justice
had largely been
unwilling to step up
to that task.
GERGEL:
The Justice Department
had endless explanations
about why it simply
wasn't possible to do this.
You had all white juries,
all white grand juries.
Why are they all white?
Because African Americans
are disenfranchised.
And getting a conviction
against a white police officer
is not realistic.
It's not going to happen
in the South.
IFILL:
There's this part of it that
is about treating the South
as though it is some peculiar,
unique, hothouse flower
that has to be handled
carefully.
(humorless chuckle)
And that, that, that you kind of
didn't try to interfere
with something that was regarded
as kind of cultural.
And this really comes out of
the idea that Southern mores
were sufficiently different,
that it would do you no good
to try to interfere with them.
FREDERICKSON:
What the N.A.A.C.P. can do
is try to channel
righteous outrage,
try to shine a light on this
incredibly heinous incident
and perhaps go above the head
of local law enforcement
to Washington to prick the
conscience of the president.
And that, perhaps, through
the powers of the presidency,
some change can come
to the South.
MACK:
There'd been a long tradition
of Black leaders
meeting with presidents
of the United States.
But there's a lot of suspicion
of Truman.
You know, how liberal is he?
How sympathetic to the
N.A.A.C.P. is he going to be?
Nothing in Truman's background
would lead one to believe
that he would act differently
than the presidents before him.

NARRATOR:
Civil rights leaders had good
reason to regard Harry Truman
as an unlikely champion
of Black Americans.
He had grown up
in Independence, Missouri,
a town that still celebrated
its Confederate heritage.
Truman's grandparents
on both sides
were rebel partisans
and slaveowners.
GERGEL:
Harry Truman's mother
thought John Wilkes Booth
was an American hero.
She refused to sleep
in the Lincoln bedroom
in the White House.
FREDERICKSON:
He grew up in a household
where belief in white supremacy
was simply in the air.
People used racial epithets
very casually
and he continued to use them
well into his adult life.
NARRATOR:
Despite his background,
President Truman was willing
to listen to the concerns
of civil rights advocates.
On September 19, 1946,
Truman invited Walter White
and a delegation
of religious and labor leaders
for a meeting
in the Oval Office.

GERGEL:
The meeting begins
and the civil rights leaders
are asking the president
to pass legislation
prohibiting lynching in America.
Harry Truman says
to the leaders,
"I understand your concerns,
but there's not the will in this
country for new legislation."
Walter White is listening
to this discussion.
And he realizes that
Harry Truman doesn't get it.
He stops the discussion
and says, "Mr. President,
I need to tell you the story of
the blinding of Isaac Woodard."

MACK:
People like Harry Truman
need to be woken up.
That was part of
the N.A.A.C.P.'s job,
was to wake people up
to injustices they tolerated,
that they ignored,
that they were complicit in,
and to make them see it.
JAMES:
Harry Truman, decades earlier,
after World War I had been
a returning veteran.
A white returning veteran,
to be sure,
but the idea that a war veteran
wearing his uniform
could be pulled off a bus
and attacked and beaten
by law enforcement officers,
surprised Truman
and enraged him.
GERGEL:
Truman became red-faced,
extremely agitated,
jaw clenched, and then turns
to his staff and says,
"My God, I didn't know
it was as terrible as this.
We have got to do something."

NARRATOR:
The next day, the president
fired off a letter
to his attorney general,
referencing Isaac Woodard
and insisting it would
"require the inauguration
of some sort of policy
to prevent such happenings."
Five days later,
at Truman's insistence,
the attorney general
ordered federal prosecutors
in South Carolina to initiate
criminal proceedings
against Police Chief
Lynwood Shull.
FREDERICKSON:
This is unprecedented
for the president
of the United States
to involve himself
in what white Southerners see
as a local matter.
IFILL:
This was a way of life for them.
They thought it was perfectly
normal for a Southern sheriff
to get away with blinding
a Black man.
And so the mere fact of the
federal government's attention,
and engagement demonstrated that
someone was watching.
It demonstrated that perhaps
the South would not be treated
as this peculiar region
that we won't touch.
It was very, very powerful.
NARRATOR:
President Truman's resolve
to hold Chief Shull accountable
was met with predictable
resistance,
even by the U.S. attorney
in charge of the case.
GERGEL:
It is greeted in South Carolina
with shock, anger, revulsion,
in the white political
leadership.
The U.S. attorney
for South Carolina
wanted no part of this case.
The Justice Department
makes it very clear,
this is not a matter of debate,
this is an order.
You are to bring this case.
(crowd chattering)
NARRATOR:
When Isaac Woodard returned
to South Carolina for the trial,
the N.A.A.C.P. dispatched
Franklin Williams,
one of their finest attorneys,
to accompany him.
MACK:
The N.A.A.C.P. sends
Franklin Williams to travel
with Isaac Woodard
for several reasons:
he's blind, he needed somebody
to navigate around,
and also they
fundamentally don't trust
the Department of Justice.

GILBERT KING:
Franklin Williams recognizes
that the object
of this entire thing was to make
it almost like a culture war.
It was going to be
a Southern way of life
versus these Northern activists
and intruders trying to dictate
their way of life on the South.

NARRATOR:
Williams offered plenty
of assistance to the prosecution
at their first and only meeting,
less than 24 hours
before the start of the trial.
He had a list
of possible witnesses,
including bus passengers
who had seen Lynnwood Shull's
first unprovoked blows
to Woodard's head.
He also had at the ready
a report
by N.A.A.C.P. investigators
detailing Shull's history
of violence against
the Black citizens in Batesburg.
But the prosecution
waved him off.
(gavel pounds)

On the morning
of November 5, 1946,
the courtroom in Columbia
was tense and segregated.
(gavel pounds)
Shull's supporters occupied
one section of the gallery,
determined to witness
the repudiation
of a federal government
gone too far.
(gavel pounds)
A delegation of anxious
Black college students
took up the other half,
hoping to catch
the first glimmers
of a sea change
in Southern justice.
A hush fell over the room
as Judge J. Waties Waring
called the trial to order.
(gavel pounds)
GERGEL:
J. Waties Waring was an
eighth-generation Charlestonian.
His father was a
Confederate veteran,
multiple generations
of his family were slaveholders.
He was no advocate
for civil rights.
And he, frankly, early on
when he got assigned this case,
he had a lot of doubts
about the appropriateness
of the federal government
to prosecute a police officer.
NARRATOR:
Judge Waring, like most in South
Carolina's political class,
harbored plenty of suspicions
about federal intervention
in this case.
Chiefly, that President Truman
was motivated more
by the coming midterms
than a concern for justice.
But Waring's skepticism
began unraveling
as soon as Isaac Woodard
rose to testify.
GERGEL:
He's wearing a brown suit.
He has sunglasses.
He has to be guided
to the witness chair
by court personnel.
And he then begins
on the direct examination
to describe what happened,
and the story is just
completely credible.
Waring knows it's true.
FREDERICKSON:
Waring is face-to-face with
this man who bears on his body
the scars of Southern racism.
He cannot look away from this
walking, talking tragedy
of injustice.
GERGEL:
The crux of the case is whether
excessive and unnecessary force
was used in regard
to Isaac Woodard.
The police chief claimed
"I only hit him once, I don't
know how he got blinded."
But how do you crush the globes
of both eyes with one strike?

NARRATOR:
The government finished
presenting its case
against Shull after just an hour
and 25 minutes.
The prosecutors had not called
witnesses who had seen
the attack unfold,
or presented any evidence
about Chief Shull's pattern
of violence against
the Black citizens of Batesburg.
As the prosecution rested,
Franklin Williams
sat in the courtroom,
furiously scrawling notes.
(pen scratching paper)
MACK:
It was going to be
a difficult case to win,
but even given that,
the Department of Justice acted
with incompetence.
They failed to call
key witnesses.
They let the defense lawyers
examine the jury pool
and asked them whether
they'd been members
all these white people
asked them whether they'd been
members of the N.A.A.C.P.
I mean they never asked them
whether they'd been members
of the Ku Klux Klan.
They were just sort of
incompetent from top to bottom.
There's a reason for that.
This is not a case
that the Justice Department
wanted to bring.
And at trial, they showed that
their heart was not in it.
GERGEL:
Judge Waring was horrified
that he was made part
of this travesty.
He sends the jury out
to deliberate,
and he tells his assistant
United States marshal,
"I'll be back in a few minutes.
And the bewildered marshal says,
"Your Honor, you can't leave.
This jury is going to be back
in five minutes."
He says, "They're not
coming back in five minutes
because I won't be here."

He was not going to allow a jury
to do a five-minute verdict,
which he thought would just be
the capstone
of a great injustice.
That part he controlled,
and he made them sit in that
room and stew in their juices,
until he got back.

Judge Waring walks down Main
Street to the state capitol,
and when he comes back
25 minutes later,
they're banging on that door.
(chuckling):
They've been banging on it
for 20 minutes
and they come out
and they announce
the acquittal of Lynwood Shull.

NARRATOR:
An exhausted Isaac Woodard
had already retreated
back to his hotel
when he received the news.
He wept, then collected himself,
and stepped outside
to face reporters.
"I'm not mad at anybody,"
he told them.
"I just feel bad.
"That's all.
I just feel bad."

Inside the courthouse,
Judge Waring hastily packed up
his briefcase and then hurried
to meet his wife, Elizabeth,
whom he found badly shaken.
GERGEL:
She had attended the trial.
And she found
the facts of the case
astonishing, cruel, vicious.
When the jury came back
and acquitted Shull,
no one noticed that she slipped
out of the back of the courtroom
in tears.
BELINDA GERGEL:
She was profoundly moved by the
testimony of Isaac Woodard,
about what had happened to him
at the hands of Chief Shull.
She said she had never seen,
never appreciated,
never understood that these
sorts of things could happen.

NARRATOR:
Elizabeth Avery Waring was from
a well-to-do family in Michigan
and had only come South
late in life.
Like Waties, she had never paid
much attention
to the racial caste system
in and around Charleston.

NEWSREEL ANNOUNCER:
Charleston, a gracious old city,
where memories and traditions
live and thrive
in a congenial air.
(bell tolling)
Everywhere is an old time,
almost an old world,
charm and quaintness.

(shouting indistinctly)
And everywhere, of course,
the Negroes.
The real Negro quarters
in Charleston may not boast
classic colonial architecture
in all its flower,
but it has a quaintness
all its own.
MACK:
The Southern system
of segregation wasn't just
some benign system that
whites and Blacks acceded to
and everybody was happy.
(indistinct chattering)
It was a violent system.
It was based on violence.
If you got out of line,
there was violent repression,
and Woodard exemplified that.
You know,
for someone like Waring,
he'd spent his whole life
ignoring that.
NARRATOR:
"I couldn't take it, at first,"
Waring would later admit.
"I used to say
it couldn't be true.
"You grow up in it
and the moss gets in your eyes.
"You learn to rationalize away
the evil and filth
and you see magnolias instead."
IFILL:
There is a willful blindness,
frankly,
among most white people
about the truth of racism
and white supremacy
in this country.

There is some ignorance because,
of course,
we live very segregated lives,
but it's right to say how could
he possibly not have known?
He could not have known because
to be a comfortable middle-class
white person in this country
generally involves
refusing to see what is hiding
in plain sight.

RICHARD GERGEL:
The trial shattered their
illusion about the benign nature
of Southern life.
And, once shattered,
where do they go?
There was just no tolerance
in Southern society of that day,
to any honest discussion
about race.
Any questioning of Jim Crow was
viewed by the segregationists
as an existential threat.
BELINDA GERGEL:
There was no course on this.
They certainly didn't know of
anyone in Charleston
that could help them
better understand,
so the two of them
begin a series of study
on race relations in the South.
IFILL:
They take in books every night,
they read them,
and then they have sessions
after dinner where they ask
each other questions,
and they basically
create their own
personal seminar to try
to understand racism in America.

NARRATOR:
The Warings started with
two groundbreaking new works
that examined the origins and
the impact of white supremacy
in the South: W.J. Cash's book,
"The Mind of the South,"
and Gunnar Myrdal's
"An American Dilemma."
Both books destroyed
the comforting story
white Southerners
liked to tell themselves:
that slavery and Jim Crow
had always been
paternal institutions
and that the "Negro" had long
lived under the protections
of a benevolent master race.

Both made plain that white
moderates, like Waring himself,
were complicit in this racist,
violent system.
RICHARD GERGEL:
These are important books,
they're complicated books,
they're challenging books.
Judge Waring described them
as tough medicine for him.
BELINDA GERGEL:
They rode through
different neighborhoods
and began to see
the different ways
that white Charlestonians
and Black Charlestonians
experienced life in the city.
(chair creaking)
As they began to read,
and understand, and question
all that they've thought about
race in the past,
it becomes clear to both of them
that the road ahead
is going to be a rocky road,
but that this just may be
the road
that they are uniquely prepared
to follow.

NARRATOR:
Looking askance at Charleston
society wasn't such a great leap
for either of the Warings,
who had been increasingly
feeling like outsiders
in their own hometown.
Just the previous year,
Judge Waring had scandalized
his friends and neighbors
by abruptly announcing
to his first wife, Annie,
that he'd fallen in love
with their bridge partner,
Elizabeth.

Divorce was not only
frowned upon in South Carolina;
it was illegal.
But Waring devised a plan
to send Annie to Florida,
where she could legally
petition for divorce.
A week after the dissolution
of his marriage to Annie,
Waties and Elizabeth were wed.
RICHARD GERGEL:
Their friends in Charleston
We're talking about
a couple hundred people,
the sort of social set
in Charleston
They blame Elizabeth
for the breakup of the marriage.
NARRATOR:
Elizabeth, a Northerner now
on her third marriage,
was an easy target
for Charleston's society dames,
who branded her a "floozie"
and told their children,
"You may be polite if the new
Mrs. Waring speaks to you,
but never address her."
The judge noted that even
his oldest friends
crossed the street to avoid him.
RICHARD GERGEL:
They clearly were surprised
by their treatment
because they both had been
very engaged in the social life
in Charleston.
And having been read out of
Charleston's high society,
he was prepared to look
more critically at the world
in which he had previously lived
and accepted unquestionably.
(birds chirping)
(flags rustling in the wind)
NARRATOR:
By the end of 1946,
a racial reckoning in the
United States seemed inevitable.
Like the Warings,
President Harry Truman felt
called to respond to the
blinding of Isaac Woodard
and the mockery it made
of the principles
America had just defended
in a long and brutal war.
But political forces had left
Truman with limited power
to take action against
white supremacy.

On the same day Woodard's
assailant walked free,
November 5, 1946,
the president absorbed
a stunning repudiation
at the polls.
Democrats lost both the House
and the Senate
for the first time
in a generation.
Forcing the question of
civil rights, Truman understood,
was likely to weaken the party
further.
FREDERICKSON:
Harry Truman has to deal with
political realities,
and the realities are
that the Democratic Party
is an unwieldy coalition
including white Southerners,
who are staunchly segregationist
and supporters
of white supremacy,
and this new and growing group
of African-American voters.
Truman knows that any move
that he makes on civil rights,
he risks alienating
Southern white Democrats.
But at this moment,
when he sees a representative
of the United States,
a soldier in uniform,
Isaac Woodard, who is maimed
it sounds simplistic,
but I think something
just kind of clicks in him,
that this simply cannot stand.

We hold ourselves up
as the beacon of democracy.
We hold ourselves up
as moral leaders.
Moral leaders do not blind
their own servicemen.

NARRATOR:
On December 5, 1946,
one month after the acquittal
of Isaac Woodard's attacker,
Harry Truman signed
an executive order establishing
the President's Committee
on Civil Rights.
The president charged his new
committee with laying bare
hard truths about the
intimidation and violence used
to enforce racial segregation,
and with recommending concrete
measures to "safeguard"
the rights of every American,
regardless of race, creed,
or religion.

MACK:
Harry Truman is a politician,
and political considerations
are never far from
the ambit
of a politician's decisions.
But there were certain actions
he took which could not be
explained on the basis
of political advantage.
He appointed the President's
Committee on Civil Rights,
I think, probably more for moral
reasons than anything else.
He saw injustice.
He was outraged by it.
He thought that he should do
something.
And given Truman's background,
it undoubtedly was a surprise
to civil rights advocates.
JAMES:
Truman said many things
that were absolutely racist
and indefensible.
They were what we would consider
of the time for a white man
from Missouri.
But Truman saw no contradiction
between these personal views
and what he saw as
America's legal obligations
to its citizens.
That it does not matter
what you personally feel,
whom you would have to your home
for dinner,
or whom you would have
a glass of bourbon with
at the end of the day.
What matters is that
these people have rights
under the constitution
because this is
the United States of America.
("Lift Every Voice and Sing"
playing)
CHOIR:
Lift every voice and sing ♪
MAN:
Lift every voice and sing ♪
NARRATOR:
On a brutally hot, humid day
at the end of June 1947,
an audience of 10,000
Many of them African American
gathered on the Capitol Mall
in a state of high anticipation.
(people chattering)
Harry Truman was about to do
what no United States president
had ever done.
He had accepted an invitation
from Walter White
to address the annual convention
of the N.A.A.C.P.
at the base
of the Lincoln Memorial.
RICHARD GERGEL:
The N.A.A.C.P. was considered
a radical organization.
Some Southern politicians
considered it
a Communist front organization.
I mean, if you were a member
of the N.A.A.C.P. in the South
and you were a school teacher,
you were probably going to get
fired.
And to have Harry Truman
go in front and speak
to the N.A.A.C.P.
was a remarkable moment.
He had multiple drafts
of the speech done.
He was editing it himself,
and he wrote a letter
to his sister, and he says,
"I'm getting ready
to give a speech
that Mama isn't going to like."
TRUMAN:
Mrs. Roosevelt,
Senator Morris,
distinguished guests,
ladies and gentlemen,
I should like to talk to you
briefly
about civil rights
and human freedom.
It is more important today
than ever before to ensure
that all Americans
enjoy these rights.
(applause)
When I say all Americans,
I mean all Americans.
(louder applause)
JAMES:
The theme can be summed up
in two words
that Truman used several times
in the speech,
which was only 12 minutes long.
And those two words are
"all Americans."
He kept repeating the phrase
"all Americans."
There is no justifiable reason
for discrimination
because of ancestry,
or religion, or race, or color.
(applause)
We cannot any longer await
the growth of a will to action
in the slowest state
or the most backward community.
(applause)
Our national government
must show the way.
(applause)
RICHARD GERGEL:
It was a stunning speech.
And when he sat down, Walter
White, sitting next to him,
is in disbelief.
And he said,
"Mr. President, I just
I can't believe
what you just said."
And he said, "Walter,
I meant every word of it."
(birds chirping)

NARRATOR:
Judge J. Waties Waring had
become increasingly convinced
that a bitter fight over racism
was coming to South Carolina.
He would later remember that he
was faced with two choices:
"Either you were going to be
governed by
"the white supremacy doctrine
and just shut your eyes
"and bowl this thing through,
"or you were going to be a
federal judge
and decide the law
That was the issue."
RICHARD GERGEL:
A judge doesn't normally go
and pick his cases,
but Judge Waring tells his
clerk,
"Keep an eye open
for new civil rights cases.
Let me know when they have
occurred."

NARRATOR:
That evening,
Waties told Elizabeth about
an explosive new case he was
considering
for his trial docket.
The case, Elmore v. Rice,
had originated when
George Elmore,
a prosperous Black businessman,
had been told by the
South Carolina Democratic Party
that he was ineligible to vote
in the upcoming primary.
Denying Elmore the right to vote
was in direct violation
of the Supreme Court's 1944
ruling
in Smith v. Allwright, which
banned the whites-only primary.
IFILL:
When you win a Supreme Court
case like that,
what is supposed to happen
is everyone is supposed
to comply with the judgment
of the court.
South Carolina doesn't.
The South Carolina Democratic
Party says, "Well,
"you know, that may be what
the Supreme Court said
"but they must've been talking
to Texas.
They couldn't have been
talking to us."

NARRATOR:
South Carolina's segregationist
Democrats adopted the strategy
of willful ignorance
for a reason.
The Black population in
South Carolina stood
at roughly 40 percent,
second only to Mississippi's.
And that was a lot
of potential voters
who might start demanding
equal rights.

So even though the Supreme Court
had left no wiggle room
in striking down the all-white
primary,
the white power structure in the
state executed a spectacular
end run around the ruling.
RICHARD GERGEL:
It repealed every law on the
books relating to the primary
and then claimed
the 14th Amendment
did not apply to the Democratic
Party of South Carolina,
because there was
no state action.
This was a private club having
an election.
MACK:
Voting is really the lynchpin
of the rest of the system.
Whites have to be in power
to control the mechanisms
of the state.
To do that, they have
to suppress Black voting.
So, Elmore, for Judge Waring,
is going to involve a direct
challenge to the system
of Southern repression,
domination, and segregation,
unlike almost all of the cases
that came before it.
RICHARD GERGEL:
So Judge Waring said to
Elizabeth,
"I need to tell you
I've taken this case.
"And we, up to this point,
"we've been doing this kind
of privately, we haven't
"really been discussing
our views with others.
"But if I rule for Mr. Elmore,
our lives will never
be the same."
Elizabeth looked at him
and said, "You go for it.
"It's the right thing to do.
I will be with you
every step of the way."

NARRATOR:
In June of 1947,
J. Waties Waring headed back
to the same courtroom where
Isaac Woodard's testimony
had so shaken him
just eight months earlier,
this time to hear
Elmore v. Rice.
Representing George Elmore were
the N.A.A.C.P.'s top attorneys,
Thurgood Marshall
and Robert Carter.
In court, attorneys for
the South Carolina Democrats
expounded their novel argument:
the Democratic Party
was a private club,
and enjoyed the right
to restrict its membership
as it saw fit.
The federal court had no more
business
directing their elections
than it did directing
a ladies sewing circle.
Judge Waring was not impressed.
IFILL:
If you are a judge,
and a judge who's now awakening
to the reality of white
supremacy
and racial discrimination,
as Waties Waring is,
you understand that this case
actually constitutes
an opportunity to talk about the
role of the Supreme Court
in relationship to
Southern states,
the way in which political power
is harnessed and controlled
as part of white supremacy,
and as a way to talk about
what the power
of local judges are
to stop white supremacists
in the South
from carrying out their plans.
NARRATOR:
Waring issued his ruling on
July 12, 1947,
just two weeks after
Truman's appearance
at the national convention
of the N.A.A.C.P.
He found for Elmore, quoting
directly from Truman's speech:
"We can no longer afford the
luxury of a leisurely attack
"upon prejudice
and discrimination.
"We cannot, any longer, await
the growth of a will to action
in the slowest state
or the most backward community."
GERGEL:
He says it's a joke.
It's a ridiculous argument.
Private clubs do not elect the
president of the United States.
And he finished the order
with a resounding call
for his South Carolinians.
He said, "It is time
"for South Carolina to rejoin
the union
and to adopt the American way
of conducting elections."
IFILL:
There was no effort to uphold
the nobility of Southern white
supremacy, right?
He's calling it out
for what it is.

For Judge Waring,
standing as a figure alone
in a deeply entrenched Southern
community,
it is his farewell.
It's his farewell to the society
in which he grew up
and it marks an articulation
of his decision to go it alone
with his wife in that community.
(crowd applauding)
NEWSREEL NARRATOR:
The Southern revolt against
President Truman
reaches its climax at
Birmingham,
under the States' Rights banner.
More than 6,000 flock
to the rump convention
to select the presidential
ticket.
Thirteen Southern states
are represented
in the uproarious session,
which precedes the nomination
of Governors Thurmond
of South Carolina,
and Fielding Wright
of Mississippi
as party standard bearers.

NARRATOR:
By the time the next election
season arrived,
a huge swath of Southern
Democrats had had enough
of what they called
"federal intrusion."
Segregationists had held sway
in local politics for decades,
and they didn't intend to be
pushed around
by the United States
Supreme Court,
or federal judges
like J. Waties Waring,
or even the president.
(crowd cheering)
MAN:
Good-bye Harry, good-bye Harry!
MACK:
At the 1948 Democratic National
Convention,
Dixiecrats walk out
over the civil rights plank
prompted by President Truman's
actions, originally,
and Strom Thurmond runs
as a presidential candidate
on behalf of the Dixiecrats.
In the words of John Paul Jones,
"We have just begun to fight!"
(crowd cheering)
FREDERICKSON:
There are thousands of
white people in attendance.
The hall is decorated in
red, white, and blue bunting.
It is festooned
with Confederate flags.
People are holding aloft
pictures of Robert E. Lee.
There's no question as to
sort of
the animating spirit
of this group,
which is to return the South
to the past,
to maintain
the racial status quo,
to maintain white supremacy.
It's another effort on the part
of this president
to dominate the country by force
and to put into effect
these uncalled for and these
damnable proposals
he has recommended under the
guise of so-called civil rights.
And I tell you the American
people, from one side
or the other, had better wake up
and oppose such a program.
And if they don't,
the next thing will be
a totalitarian state
in these United States.
(crowd cheering)
FREDERICKSON:
The Dixiecrats,
their goal is to be a spoiler,
to deny either major party
a majority
of electoral college votes,
thereby throwing the election
into the House of
Representatives, where they can
use their power to win
concessions on civil rights.

Truman didn't blink,
and he didn't retreat.
Nine days after
the Dixiecrat revolt,
he gave the States Righters
a little primer
in presidential power.
Truman signed an executive order
desegregating the federal
workforce
and, more shockingly,
the entirety of the
United States Armed Forces.
FREDERICKSON:
Desegregating the military
is something
that Truman could do with a
stroke of a pen.
He does it because
he's already seen
the worst that Southerners are
going to do, right?
They've already staged a revolt,
so why not go all in?
RICHARD GERGEL:
A lifelong friend writes
him a letter and says, "Harry,
"get off this civil rights
thing.
If you don't do it, you're going
to lose the election."
Truman writes him a letter back:
it says,
"You don't know what I know."
He then tells him the story of
the blinding of Isaac Woodard.
He mentions these other
atrocities as well,
and he says, "If I lose the
election over this issue,
it will have been for
a good cause."
In that way, President Truman
and Judge Waring are the same.
Every instinct of political
survival should have told
both of them to keep their hand
off the hotspot of the oven.
Both of them went
to the hotspot.

NARRATOR:
As the 1948 primary approached,
South Carolina Democrats
were brazenly evading
Waring's decision in Elmore
allowing Black South Carolinians
to register to vote
only after they signed an oath
declaring their opposition
to racial integration.

Waring summoned nearly
a hundred officials
of the South Carolina
Democratic Party
and ordered them to register
Black citizens
without swearing any oath.
RICHARD GERGEL:
He tells them that
a federal judge
faced with contempt
has two choices.
He can impose a fine
or a prison sentence.
He says, "If you violate
my order again,
there will be no fines."
The message that he was prepared
to jail white men
for depriving African Americans
the right to vote
hit the white establishment
like a thunderbolt.

NARRATOR:
Threatening letters began
arriving at the courthouse
and at Judge Waring's home
soon after.
Obscene calls came into
his phone line so frequently
that he was forced to disconnect
his service.
FREDERICKSON:
White Southerners,
as much as they despise
African Americans
and despise civil rights,
they often level the most venom
against people
they think are traitors,
and that would be Waring.

NARRATOR:
The Warings lived their
lives more and more
on their own terms.
Neighbors were particularly
scandalized
by the unlikely visitors
that were seen calling
at 61 Meeting Street.
RICHARD GERGEL:
They became friendly
with a number
of African-American activists.
Septima Clark, who was a fiery
advocate for civil rights,
was very close with the Warings,
was a frequent visitor
in the house at a time
that Black people only entered
the homes of white people
through the back door as maids.
Ruby Cornwell was the matriarch
of the civil rights community
in Charleston.
She was a frequent visitor
and a close friend.
But perhaps the most interesting
relationship
that Judge Waring develops
is a close, personal
relationship with Walter White
then the most important civil
rights leader in America.
The Warings just got
to the point,
they didn't care what other
people thought.
There's a very famous photograph
of the Warings,
featured in "Collier's"
magazine,
that showed a dinner party
at the Warings' house.
The article was titled,
"The Lonesomest Man in Town,"
but he didn't look that
lonesome.
He had lots of friends
at his dinner table.
The only notable part was they
were all African American.
BELINDA GERGEL:
They're socializing,
they're laughing,
they're enjoying each other's
friendship as equals,
and that was terrifying
to white Charlestonians.
NARRATOR:
Elizabeth's willingness to flout
the social conventions
of Charleston society and her
candor about Southern racism
brought unprecedented national
attention
to the wife of a sitting
federal judge.

BELINDA GERGEL:
She found her voice.
And she put white Charlestonians
on notice that that was going
to be a voice that
she would not hesitate to use.

She was invited,
one of the first women,
to come on "Meet the Press."
NEWS ANNOUNCER:
Tonight from Washington, D.C.,
this is J. Waties Waring
of Charleston, South Carolina,
wife of federal Judge Waring
who stirred up a hornet's nest
in the South by her vigorous
attack on white supremacy.
MARY JAMES COTTRELL (archival):
Mrs. Waring, you charged
in your speech
before the YWCA group in
Charleston
that the whites down here
are a sick,
confused, and decadent people,
and that like all decadent
people, they are full of pride
and complacency, introverted,
morally weak, and low.
What brought you to this
drastic conclusion?
ELIZABETH WARING (archival):
Living there and observing them,
a very deep study
of the subject.
Any people who enslave the minds
and bodies of another people
are bound to destroy
their own souls.
MACK:
In ordinary circumstances,
the spouse of a judge would
not do what she did.
But given the depth
of the problem,
the importance that somebody
speak out,
she felt as though she should.
COTTRELL (archival):
Are you crusading only
for the Negro's civil rights,
such as the freedom to vote,
freedom of safety of his person,
and freedom from lynching,
and so forth, or are you
for social integration,
is that what you want, too?
ELIZABETH WARING (archival):
I want the whole thing I want
him to go through the same door,
and so does the judge I want
him to be an equal citizen.

NARRATOR:
Reaction in South Carolina
was swift and predictable.
State legislators
appropriated $10,000
to fund impeachment
of the judge,
then resolved to purchase
railroad tickets
for the Warings,
anywhere they desired,
as long as it was out of the
state with no return.
Two men were seen burning a
Ku Klux Klan cross
in the Warings' back garden.
And on a quiet evening,
while the Warings were home
playing canasta
in their drawing room,
three shots rang out
in front of their home.
(three gunshots echo)
BELINDA GERGEL:
Their home is right
on the street
and they're inside
and suddenly two big bricks
come through the window.
(glass shattering)
They don't know if people are
coming through the window
and through the doors next.
But they're petrified.
They retreat to their
dining room
where they're hiding
behind a wall,
believing that they are
under fire.
And within days, the
United States Attorney General
provided 24-hour
U.S. Marshal protection
literally, marshals sleeping out
in front of his house
throughout the rest
of his service
as a United States
district judge.
No federal judge had ever faced
such an attack.
NARRATOR:
The judge, 70 years old
and under constant siege,
understood his days on the bench
were numbered.
He confided in Elizabeth
that he meant to do one
big thing before he retired.
With her support,
he fixed his sights
on destroying the precedent that
had underpinned legalized racism
in the South for more than
50 years:
the strange doctrine of
"separate but equal."
FREDERICKSON:
They are disgusted
by the people
who have been their friends
and who have sat idly by
and benefited from this
oppressive system.
And they simply can't take
it anymore.
And he is now in this position
where he can do
something about it.
What the record now shows us,
at the time in which the most
intense pressure
was being put on Judge Waring,
he was making the plans of what
would become
the Briggs v. Elliott dissent
The case that changes America.
NEWSREEL REPORTER:
This is South Carolina
Summerton, South Carolina
A country crossroads
in the rich soil,
isolated in time and space,
and given to old ways
But not always uncritically.
Here, perhaps more than
elsewhere in the United States,
the racial patterns,
the social patterns,
the economic patterns
are all the same pattern.

NARRATOR:
Briggs v. Elliott
the case that would set
in motion
the demise of legalized
segregation
grew from the unlikeliest soil
in the nation.

Clarendon County,
just 90-odd miles
from where Isaac Woodard
had been beaten,
was a place well known
to Judge Waring.
"It's in what we call
the Low Country,"
he said of Clarendon.
"Swamp lands and rivers.
"One of the most backward
counties of the state.
"The Negro schools were just
tumbledown, dirty shacks
with horrible outdoor
toilet facilities."
J.A. DELAINE JR.:
I lived in Summerton
and I cursed the day I was born
and had to live there.
And I vowed that when
I got grown,
I'd never see that damn
place again.
NATHANIEL BRIGGS:
They have talked about us
as being subhuman.
I guess from generation
to generation,
they couldn't accept the fact
that I'm human just like them,
just like them.
DELAINE JR.:
Most of the schools
operated for three to four
months out of the year.
And the reason for that was
these kids need to be in,
in the fields
plowing cotton, or whatever.
So we can't have
school when they need to work
to get our cotton
out of the fields.
BRIGGS:
Some of the kids in my class
didn't show up
till around Thanksgiving.
Instead of being in school,
they was out working the farm.
Come early April, these kids
are out of the school,
going back to the farm to work.
And the system really
didn't care.
It was not meant for us as
Black folks, but two things:
go in somebody's kitchen,
or go in somebody's fields.
That happened to us
a hundred years or more.
That's what was geared
for us to do.
They didn't expect no more
from you.

NARRATOR:
In 1947, local parents
in Clarendon County
decided to do something
about the problem
of simply getting their children
to school.
There was a fleet of buses
for the white children
in the county
None for the Black children.
FREDERICKSON:
Some of the Black children in
their community
have to walk nine miles
to school.

They have to ford a river.
NARRATOR:
A group of Summerton parents
were able to raise
several hundred dollars
to buy a used school bus,
but the bus broke down
constantly.
So the parents turned
to the Reverend J.A. DeLaine,
a principal and minister
with ties to the N.A.A.C.P.
DELAINE JR.:
He suggested, "We'll go in and
we'll talk to the superintendent
"of schools about getting funds
for gas money, repair the bus,
and pay a salary
to who drives the bus."
It was turned down.
"Ain't got no money
for you niggers."
Literally, is what they
what he was told.

BRIGGS:
It was told that Black folks
didn't pay enough taxes.
You couldn't even vote.
So there was no Black folks on
the school board to direct
and to address the issues
that was at hand.
So what power do you have?
DELAINE JR.:
My father then said, "Well,
you know, let's file a suit."
I want to talk
with Thurgood Marshall.
NARRATOR:
Thurgood Marshall,
the 40-year-old chief
of the N.A.A.C.P. Legal Defense
Fund,
reluctantly answered the summons
from Clarendon County.
(train whistling)
All through the 1940s, Marshall
had been making these trips
from New York into the heart
of the Jim Crow South.
He had been belittled by judges
and opposing counsel
who didn't think he could be an
attorney,
threatened with violence,
and nearly lynched.
GILBERT KING:
White Americans who want
to maintain segregation
recognize that Thurgood Marshall
and his legal team are becoming
very effective at chipping
away at that status quo.
And that is why his life is in
danger whenever he travels,
particularly when he travels
in the South.
They would have to move him
around from house to house
at night
during a trial because the Klan
was after him,
and they didn't want these
Night Riders
to find out where Marshall was.
He was threatened constantly,
his life was always in danger
and he was terrified, too.
But he also knew that it was
important
for the African American
communities
in those Jim Crow balconies
to look down and see an
African American
who was not a defendant,
who was in a suit,
who was arguing the law
with white men.

MACK:
It was often an electric
experience
for local African American
communities to see
Thurgood Marshall come to town
because he would do something
that nobody had ever seen
before,
which was to address white
people and to make them answer
and state reasons for what
they were doing,
and to sometimes call
them liars.
NARRATOR:
Marshall leveled
with the Reverend DeLaine
and the parents of
Clarendon County.
If the N.A.A.C.P. was going to
take on their case,
it was going to be about more
than a school bus.
He wanted to sue for total
equality with the white schools.
Facilities, teacher salaries,
textbooks, buses
Every resource
the white schools had,
they would demand in equal
measure for the Black schools.
Marshall explained he wouldn't
even consider taking the case
until he had 20 reliable,
credible plaintiffs,
people who would not cower in
the face of certain intimidation
from the white supremacists
who ruled Clarendon County.
More than 20 Black citizens
agreed to sign on.
On November 17, 1950,
Thurgood Marshall hurried along
Charleston's
palmetto-lined streets for a
pre-trial hearing
with Judge Waring,
unaware that the judge had been
closely following
events in Summerton.
Neither man harbored any doubts
about the strength of
Marshall's case:
The N.A.A.C.P. was clearly
poised to win equal facilities
for the Black children
of Clarendon County.
(school bell ringing)
MACK:
The schools for white children
were generally the best schools
that the tax base
could establish and support.
The schools for Black children,
even in some middle class school
districts,
mocked the very notion
of being schools.
They were visibly unequal
to the naked eye.
One need not even step inside
to see how unequal they were.
RICHARD GERGEL:
When Marshall arrives
at the courthouse,
he is told by court personnel,
Judge Waring wants to see you
in his chambers.
Lawyers call this ex-parte
communication it happened.
Judge Waring says to Marshall,
"I don't want to try any more
equalization cases.
Bring me a frontal challenge
to segregation."
FREDERICKSON:
Thurgood Marshall is absolutely
floored when Waring
essentially tells him, "Look,
I need you to make this case,
get rid of segregation
altogether."
He basically tells Marshall,
"Look, you need to go
for broke here."

NARRATOR:
Thurgood Marshall had dedicated
much of his life
to overturning
legalized segregation.
But he was playing
the long game,
executing a strategy
he had helped to devise
15 years earlier.
Segregation had been sanctioned
by an 1896 Supreme Court
decision
in a case called
Plessy v. Ferguson.
Homer Plessy,
a Black man from New Orleans,
had challenged the segregated
accommodations
of Louisiana's railroads
and lost 8-1.
MACK:
Plessy v. Ferguson
came to be seen as symbolic
of the idea of
separate but equal,
that segregation was not
unconstitutional
as long as Blacks and whites
were given equal facilities.
RICHARD GERGEL:
The N.A.A.C.P. had
adopted this strategy,
which is basically turning
Plessy v. Ferguson on its head.
It's a kind of sailing
west to arrive east.
Rather than argue against the
scourge of Plessy,
they argued for the fulfillment
of Plessy
that the constitution
is not being satisfied,
not because the facilities
are segregated,
but because they're unequal.
They were winning cases,
but the strategy had controversy
because every time
you use Plessy to support
your theory,
you were driving another nail
into the inferior legal status
of African Americans.
JAMES:
The question that
faced Marshall was,
when do we move away from the
equalization strategy
and begin to argue that
separate but equal
is unconstitutional?
And Marshall was rightly
cautious about when and where
to make that claim,
because if he chose
the wrong case
and it went to the
Supreme Court,
the worst thing that could
happen for Black Americans
across the country would be for
the Supreme Court
to ratify Plessy v. Ferguson
To confirm it in a new age
and say, "Yes, this is still
the law of the land
and it satisfies the
constitution."
RICHARD GERGEL:
What Judge Waring was pushing
him to do was very risky.
If you launched a concerted
effort to overturn Plessy
and failed, your years of all
that work would have been thrown
on the trash heap of history.
Thurgood Marshall says,
"Judge, it's on our agenda.
"It's just not tonight,
this is not the time.
This is not the place."
What he wasn't saying explicitly
was,
this is the last place in
the world we're going to try
to desegregate the schools.
This is down the end of the
road, not the beginning.
Judge Waring said,
"This is the time.
"This is the case.
"You're gonna be challenging
the constitutionality
"of a state law.
"You're going to lose,
but you'll plant the case
directly and automatically
"onto the docket of the U.S.
Supreme Court.
And he said, "Thurgood,
that's where you want to be."
(typewriter keys clacking)
NARRATOR:
At Waring's urging,
Marshall petitioned the court
to dismiss the current case
and bring a new suit,
one alleging that segregation
in South Carolina's public
schools was unconstitutional.
Marshall and his team spent the
next month preparing to refile.
But they also needed approval
from the plaintiffs
to move ahead.
IFILL:
Marshall was always very
powerfully conscious
of the risks being taken
by plaintiffs.
And if you knew anything about
Clarendon County in that period,
you knew that the Briggs
and others who stood up
to the system in that
jurisdiction were going
to have hell to pay.
(people chattering)
NARRATOR:
The week before Christmas, 1950,
dozens of parents, students,
and teachers filed into
St. Mark A.M.E. Church
in Summerton,
ready to hear an update on their
case from Robert Carter,
Marshall's key deputy.
RICHARD GERGEL:
The place was packed
to the rafters.
Mr. Carter explained that
the N.A.A.C.P. thought it was
time to attack segregation,
root and branch,
but that anyone who was a
plaintiff in the case
needed to understand they could
experience severe retaliation.
He said, "Mr. Marshall
wants you to know that.
You can withdraw."
BRIGGS:
That was made clear
to the petitioners
if you think you're experiencing
retribution now,
if this case come from here,
there's gonna probably be more
reprisals that will come
and don't know what form
it would take.
NARRATOR:
This was no great revelation
to the Reverend DeLaine,
or to the Navy veteran
Harry Briggs,
whose name was on the
legal filing
simply because he was first up
in the alphabet.
Or to any of the other
petitioners
who had signed onto the
original lawsuit.
What Marshall had warned about
nearly two years earlier
had come to pass.
MAN (archival):
Did your husband
sign this petition?
Yes, he did sign the petition.
What happened to him after that?
Right after he signed the
petition, he told him that,
unless he take his name off it,
he would lose his job.
BRIGGS:
On Christmas Eve, they gave
him a carton of cigarettes
and said we got somebody
to replace you.
Then money dries up.
Couldn't get work.
He took a pseudonym to get paid.
Because they wasn't gonna hire
Harry Briggs in the county.
MAN:
What did you tell him?
Well, I told I him we was
We only doing it
for the betterment
of the children.
Mm-hmm.
Not only our children,
but all of the children.

DELAINE JR.:
There were a lot of evictions.
My father was threatened.
The Black men in town had formed
themselves into a cadre
guarding our house at night
with guns.
RICHARD GERGEL:
Reverend Delaine,
he had his home burned,
with volunteer firemen
standing out front
refusing to provide service.
BRIGGS:
They did that to send a message,
you know.
And when his house caught
on fire, we thought
ours would be next.
MACK:
They have children,
they have families.
They have responsibilities,
and they have to think about
all that.
You know, "If I lose my farm,
what happens next?
"Maybe, I'll be killed.
"And also, maybe,
"I'm also the breadwinner
of my family.
"It's not just that I'm going
to be killed,
my family is going to be
destitute."
NARRATOR:
Now here was Robert Carter, who
didn't have to stay behind
and live in Clarendon County
asking these parents to be the
first wave of a frontal attack
on the most jagged ramparts
of segregation.
There was a pregnant silence
when Carter finished
his presentation.
PATRICIA SULLIVAN:
And then an old man in the back
of the church
raised his hand and he said, "We
wondered how long it would take
you lawyers to get there."
They were ready.

BRIGGS:
When you had enough,
you just had enough.
I mean, you just
can't take it anymore.
Where can you go?
You can't back up.
You just can't,
you gotta go forward.
And that was their mindset.
Not any of those families
backed down.
IFILL:
Clarendon County is almost
like the Isaac Woodard case.
The starkness of the facts,
the depth of the racism
goes to the very heart
of the unfairness
and the ugliness of
white supremacy.
And in that case for Marshall,
it's going right
into the eye of the storm.

NARRATOR:
Marshall didn't expect to win
Briggs v. Elliott
in the federal court of
South Carolina.
But his team did need to build
a record of evidence,
one that would give the United
States Supreme Court
a solid rationale for ending
segregation in public schools
and essentially burying its own
"separate but equal" precedent.
MACK:
Marshall has to show, well,
no matter what you did
with resources,
just the mere fact of a statute
that requires segregation
is unconstitutional.
Why is it unconstitutional?
Well, for us, it would be easy.
This is just subordination
of Black people.
But for them,
it was hard because
they didn't question it.
They weren't thinking
that segregation
was harmful to Black people.
JAMES:
He said, if you were in an
automobile accident,
I would have to show
how the accident injured you.
Here in this case,
he has to show how segregation
has injured his clients.
What harm has it caused?
Enter 37-year-old psychologist
Kenneth Clark
and his now-famous dolls.

NARRATOR:
Kenneth and Mamie Clark
the first Black Americans
to earn PhDs in psychology
from Columbia University
had recently begun conducting
a series of research experiments
to determine the effect of
segregation on Black children.
The tools of the Clarks'
experimental trade
were breathtakingly simple:
a suitcase full of dolls,
four of them gender neutral,
identical in every way except
for skin color.
Two were white,
and two were brown.
Doctor Kenneth Clark explained
their extraordinary findings
to N.A.A.C.P. attorney
Robert Carter,
who lobbied his colleagues
to make the Clarks' research
central to their legal strategy.
JAMES:
There's a great deal of debate
around the table
at Legal Defense headquarters
in New York City.
They are thinking, what are we
going to do with
what they call
"These damn dolls?"
Marshall sits at the end of the
table, says very little,
and just smokes, and smokes,
and smokes,
as the attorneys hash it out,
hash it out,
until finally Marshall says,
"I have to show injury.
"The dolls are how I'm going
to show
"the injury to the children.
We're taking the dolls with us
to South Carolina."

NARRATOR:
By daybreak on May 28, 1951,
a caravan of cars filled with
parents, teachers, and children
was well on its way from
Summerton to Charleston,
where they were finally going
to get their day in court.
As they pulled up to the
federal courthouse,
the citizens of Clarendon County
were awed to discover
they were not the only ones
who had made the journey.
(people chattering)
RICHARD GERGEL:
From across the state,
African Americans got up early
in the morning
and drove to Charleston.
And by the time the sun rose
that morning,
they were lined up
as far as the eye could see.
BRIGGS:
Out the sidewalk,
around the corner.
And these folks stood out there
in hot, hot May weather.
You ever been to South Carolina
in May?
It is hot sticky hot.
RICHARD GERGEL:
Thurgood Marshall, arriving
that morning for the trial,
was amazed he had never
seen such a crowd.
And he turned to Robert Carter
and said, "Bob, it's all over."
Carter, you know,
his young associate said,
"Thurgood, what are you talking
about?"
He said, "They're not scared
anymore."
IFILL:
For Marshall to see the throngs,
the crowds,
coming out for the first day
of trial
showed him that something had
shifted in the South.
They're not afraid anymore to
fight for their full citizenship
and to make the statement of
how important this is to them.
NARRATOR:
With the courtroom packed
beyond capacity
that hot spring morning,
Marshall began arguing his case
before a panel of three
federal judges,
one of whom was
Judge Waties Waring.
He sparred with defense
witnesses
from the school district
and presented his own
expert testimonies on the
egregious disparities
between the county's Black
and white schools.
Marshall did not stop there.
He proceeded to show the court
that the damage
to the Black children
in Clarendon County
was real and quantifiable.
His key witness
took the stand that afternoon.
Dr. Kenneth Clark described
for the court
the doll experiments he and his
wife had conducted on hundreds
of Black schoolchildren across
the country,
asking them to evaluate
and compare
the virtues of the black
and white dolls.
JAMES:
Kenneth and Mamie Clark conduct
these studies
over a period of months and it
traumatizes them
to have to do this over and over
again and get
the same answers
over and over again
from different children,
attending different schools
in different states.
Without fail, the Black children
preferred the white doll.

FREDERICKSON:
Not only does the N.A.A.C.P.
have all of the information
it needs on the brick and mortar
issues,
now they have evidence
that said,
"Look, this is inherently
damaging
"to Black children, right?
"And this is a stigma,
and this is a damage
from which they will
never recover."

NARRATOR:
The trial was shorter than
anticipated just two days.
Marshall had given it
his best shot.
As he joined the throngs
streaming out of the courtroom,
the three judges retired
to Waring's chambers
to discuss the case.
The conference went just
as expected.
Neither of the other two judges
had been persuaded
by Marshall's arguments.
Separate but equal
would stand in South Carolina.

The Briggs plaintiffs had lost,
as Marshall suspected they
would, 2-1.
But, as Waring had planned,
the appeal was headed straight
to the Supreme Court.
And he meant to arm
the N.A.A.C.P. attorneys
with something for the battle
in Washington:
a dissenting opinion
for the ages.
RICHARD GERGEL:
He knew he was writing
for history.
He knew this was his moment.
And he labored for days
carefully constructing
and rewriting and revising over
and over again this dissent.
He wrote it with care and with
precision and with passion.
MACK:
Waring's dissent
is quite remarkable.
It's a direct indictment of
segregation,
and it's important to say that
because so many people
were finessing the issue.
He described the testimony
of Dr. Clark
about the injury to Black
children, and he said,
"This must end, it must end now.
Segregation
is per se inequality."
NARRATOR:
Waring set off the last sentence
in a separate paragraph,
for effect.
And it was, in a way, his final
word on the vicious regime
of legalized white supremacy
in the Deep South.
Soon after he filed his dissent
in Briggs,
Waring wrote President Harry
Truman with the news
that he was stepping down from
his federal judgeship.
The Warings left Charleston
for good,
retiring to a small apartment
in New York City.
Thurgood Marshall was
fundraising in Alabama
when word reached him
that the Supreme Court
had finally ruled on the
constitutionality
of segregation
in public schools.
It had been a long
and frustrating wait;
three years since the trial in
Judge Waring's courtroom.
The name "Briggs"
had been subsumed by then.
The N.A.A.C.P. had brought four
similar desegregation cases,
in Virginia, Delaware,
the District of Columbia,
and Kansas.
The five cases had been
consolidated and filed
as Brown v. Board of Education
of Topeka, Kansas.
RICHARD GERGEL:
Briggs was the first case
to arrive at the Supreme Court.
By all accounts it should have
been Briggs v. Elliott.
My personal theory is that the
court did not want this case
banning school segregation to be
focused on a Southern case.
Topeka, Kansas,
was not in the South.
And the South would claim
it was being picked on.
But how do you say that if the
lead defendant
is Topeka, Kansas?

REPORTER (archival):
The Supreme Court has rendered a
momentous and historic decision
saying that education should
be equal in this free America.
THURGOOD MARSHALL:
The fact it was a unanimous
decision
should set for rest once
and for all
the problem as to whether or not
second class citizenship,
segregation,
could be consistent any longer
with the law of the country.


MACK:
Marshall and the N.A.A.C.P.
had certainly been hopeful.
I don't think there was
any reason for them
to expect it to be unanimous.
That must have been a surprise.
JAMES:
The decision is written in a
manner and at a length
such that it could be printed in
every newspaper in the country.

So that it could be read
and understood
by any literate person in the
United States.
So that it could be read
to someone
who might not be able to read
him or herself,
and that person would be able
to understand
why and how the justices
had reached this conclusion.
NARRATOR:
Citing evidence from the
Clark's doll studies,
Chief Justice Earl Warren
was explicit
about the very real damage
suffered by children
segregated by race.
"Any language in
Plessy v. Ferguson contrary
to this finding," he wrote,
"is rejected."
But Warren steered clear of any
mention of Waties Waring,
who had been the only federal
judge in the five cases
to file a dissent arguing
that segregation itself
was unconstitutional.
RICHARD GERGEL:
You got to remember at this time
Judge Waring
is a very polarizing figure.
He's probably the most reviled
white man in the South
among white Southerners.
The court didn't make his
dissent
the basis of their decision.
But it is obvious
when you read it,
it is Judge Waring's language.
(cars honking)
NARRATOR:
Back in New York City,
Walter White
and other luminaries
from New York's civil rights
community gathered
in the Warings' parlor to toast
the historic milestone
and the final triumph
of Judge Waring's
judicial strategy.
A few miles away,
Thurgood Marshall and his team
held their own victory party,
allowing themselves only
the briefest of revelries.
For Marshall, the Brown
ruling did not mark the end
of a hard-fought battle,
but the beginning of a new one.

IFILL:
Everyone was celebrating
in the office
and Marshall said "You're all
a bunch of fools," you know,
"We have a lot more work ahead,
okay?
We have to get back to work."
He understood what was to come.
As a leader, you can barely
experience excitement
without looking around the
corner for whatever
is the next challenge
or work that has to be done.
ROBERT HOOKS:
Hello, welcome to "Like It Is."
Today's edition features
a look back in time
into the tragedy of
Isaac Woodard,
a man whose confrontation with
Southern racism
came to symbolize the brutality
in America
at the end of World War II.
NARRATOR:
Nearly 40 years after his
blinding, Isaac Woodard agreed
to revisit the details
of his ordeal
with a local television
journalist.
Do you think back towards
those days,
to have something like this
happen to you
while you're still in uniform?
A lot of people ask me,
was I bitter with, you know,
with the world, with everybody?
I told them, no, I wasn't.
I wasn't because
I said, well, everybody
ain't bad, you know,
that I know.
And the one that I'm really
bitter against,
the one that really did it
to me.
He never served a day
No, no, no.
Kept his job.
Right, right.
Kept his job, they didn't even
take him off the force,
you know?
ROBERT YOUNG:
For the first few years,
he called them names
I couldn't even mention.
(chuckles)
But, uh, he grew out of it.

LAURA WILLIAMS:
I saw the part of him after
the bitterness,
and the anger,
and the frustration.
Most of the time I saw him,
he was smiling.
He was so well-dressed.
There was a tie clip on the tie,
and you could tell the way
he walked,
he was proud of who he was.
NARRATOR:
In 1962, the U.S. Army finally
granted Sergeant Woodard
the disability benefits
they had denied him
in the years following
his blinding.
Eventually, he was able to buy
several properties throughout
the Bronx
and provide a comfortable life
for himself and his family.
HOOKS:
What do you think that people
should learn about,
what's happened
to Isaac Woodard,
what lesson is there
about America?
Well, I mean, the way I feel
about it, you know,
that people should learn how
to live with one another,
and how to treat one another.
Because after all, we all are,
we're human beings,
regardless of color.
Everybody should, you know, have
some sympathy for one another,
you know?
And don't do cruel things
to one another
that you don't wanna
be did to you.
That's the way I feel about it.
NARRATOR:
Isaac Woodard died in 1992,
at age 73,
entirely unaware that
his simple request
to be treated like a man, and
the injustice that followed it,
had emboldened a federal judge
and the president of the
United States
to pursue the destruction
of legalized segregation.

FREDERICKSON:
Historians like to talk in terms
of grand narratives.
But when you look closely,
you find often it is
a single person
taking a certain action.
It's not often sufficient
to cause grand change,
but it is a spark.
IFILL:
Every fundamental shift in this
country has required the courage
of ordinary people to demand
that they be respected,
exceptional human beings
who were willing to put
their lives on the line.
The ways in which they changed
this country
we accept almost like air,
without ever giving
a moment's thought
to the individuals who
sacrificed themselves for it.
You don't know what the effect
of your speaking up
and using your voice will be.
It may even look like
it was nominal.
But in the long course
of history,
can be earth-shattering,
and powerful and important.


ANNOUNCER:
"American Experience:
The Blinding of Isaac Woodard"
is available on DVD.
To order, visit ShopPBS
or call 1-800-PLAY-PBS.
"American Experience"
is also available
with PBS Passport
and on Amazon Prime Video.


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