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ORSON 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
and 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."
[bell ringing]
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.
♪