The Blinding of Sergeant Isaac Woodard and Executive Order 9981

Quick answer: How did the blinding of Isaac Woodard lead to desegregating the military?

Hours after his 1946 Army discharge, Sergeant Isaac Woodard was pulled off a bus in Batesburg, South Carolina, and blinded by police chief Lynwood Shull. His case and other attacks on Black veterans moved a chain of citizens and a judge, and reached Harry Truman, who signed Executive Order 9981 on July 26, 1948.

On February 12, 1946, Sergeant Isaac Woodard boarded a Greyhound bus outside Augusta, Georgia, discharged that afternoon and still in uniform after four years' service, including fifteen months loading ammunition under fire in the Pacific. After he asked the driver for a restroom stop, the driver had police remove him in Batesburg, South Carolina. The police chief beat him and drove a blackjack into his eyes. Woodard woke up blind, was fined fifty dollars, and never saw again. He was twenty-six. He wasn't alone: 1946 brought violence against Black veterans in Columbia, Tennessee, and murders at Moore's Ford, Georgia. John traces a chain of ordinary people who carried the truth upward, each doing the unglamorous work of their station, until it reached a president from a Confederate family. In an election year he was expected to lose, Harry Truman signed Executive Order 9981. Political capital exists to be spent, John writes. A leader who won't spend it on principle never had power at all, only popularity.

Why it matters for leaders: The impossible and the obvious are often the same act; the difference is whether someone is willing to pay for it in advance.

Q: What did Executive Order 9981 do?

A: It desegregated the U.S. armed forces, signed by Truman in an election year over objections from his generals and much of his party.

Q: What became of Isaac Woodard?

A: He lived blind until 1992, long enough to see the Army integrated from barracks to the Joint Chiefs, and is buried in uniform at Calverton National Cemetery.

Read the full essay on Substack → https://heroespath.substack.com/p/the-blinding-of-sergeant-isaac-woodard

By John Fenzel, founder and CEO of Heroes' Path Foundation