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On February 12, 1946, a Negro veteran named Isaac Woodard, who had received his honorable discharge papers only a few hour before and who was still in uniform, took a bus at Atlanta for his home in South Carolina. When the bus stopped at a hamlet Woodard asked the driver if he could go to a rest room. The driver refused and a violent quarrel ensued. At the next stop, Batesburg, South Carolina, the driver called a policeman, saying that Woodard had made a disturbance; the policeman took him off the bus, started beating him, carted him off to jail, and ground out his eyes with the end of his club. This case too became a country-wide scandal. A mass rally held in the Lewisohn Stadium in New York raised a purse of $22,000 for the blinded veteran. It did not restore his vision. Attorney General Clark and the FBI instituted an investigation, after much public clamor, and the Batesburg police officer was identified, arrested, and brought to trial. His name was, and is, Lynwood E. Shull. The charge, brought "in a criminal information filed by the Department of Justice," was that Shull violated Woodard's "civil rights" by beating him. Shull's reply was that he had acted in self-defense. A United States district court jury acquitted Shull in half an hour. (en) |
