The Black Sergeant and the White Judge Who Changed Civil Rights History

"Hidden Figures" is another great story of African -Americans fighting for recognition of the talents and hard work. We need to stay aware of all groups who struggle and work to keep America's promise alive.

Reconstruction, Plessy v Ferguson, Jim Crow. Brown v Board....This book arrives at a very important time. We must continue to learn from history. PBS upcoming Henry Gates “Reconstruction” is a must see.

Historians agree that the widely practiced lynchings from 1877 through to 1950 were a method of social and racial control meant to terrorize black Americans into submission, and into an inferior racial caste position. It was widely reported truth that “Victims would be seized and subjected to every imaginable manner of physical torment, with the torture usually ending with being hung from a tree and set on fire. Often victims would be dismembered and mob members would take pieces of flesh bone as souvenirs. Often mobs were aided and abetted by law enforcement (indeed, they often were the same people). Officers would routinely leave a black inmate’s jail cell unguarded after rumors of a lynching began to circulate to allow for a mob to kill them before any trial or legal defense could take place”. I do not imagine that America is any better now, not after the election of Trump whose ideals were more in tune with Ku Klux Khan Ideology. He has visceral hatred for everything Obama stood, merely because of extreme colour prejudice. “The lynching…as horrible as such a thing can be. Lynching in itself is a fearful reproach to American civilization. Lynching by fire is the vengeance of a savage past … The sickening outrage is the more deplorable because it easily could have been prevented”. Fortunate are people born in a land of ancient wisdom, where the kind of brutality is unthinkable, killing innocent because of color of the skin and body part collected as souvenir!!

Let’s not forget that after the neo nazi rallies and the murder of a peaceful protester for the removal of symbols of racism such as the confederate statues in Charlottesville, the bigot in the Whitehouse had the nerve to say “there are are good people on both sides” of this issue.

We can hope that the Blinding of Sgt. Isaac Woodard becomes a Binding of Isaac turning point in our tragic history of slavery, race, and Jim Crow in America.

The mayor says "we want everyone to know it is not 1946 here anymore." Except that in the companion piece here in the NYT, neither this judge, nor other town leaders, the mayor, his ancestor a former mayor, and others claimed never to have heard about it. NEVER HEARD ABOUT IT. That means no one in the entire town (or county, probably), black or white, spoke of it...whites for their reasons, blacks for theirs. Whites' reasons would be something like "this is our town these are our values and this is what we do to keep it that way." Blacks' reasons would be something like "we get the message, this is what happens to us for no reason, and this is what happens to the white perpetrators, so be quiet and know your place if you don't want it done to you." Very clear message, as is the message of continuity spoken loudly by intentional omission. And why is this town still named "Leesburg," anyway? Which Lee was that?

How terrible that this man received no compensation for his injuries. A marker seems almost a slap in the face. As a black WW II veteran, he was banned from receiving the GI Bill benefits that nonblack veterans, male and female, received (unemployment benefits, free college tuition and living stipend, low interest mortgages and business loans fully guaranteed by the government) that established them financially for life.

Evil, whether or not done in 1946 or today, is still evil. Honor people like the late Isaac Woodard Jr. by taking on the evils of the Present Day and the days to come.

How low can one go? The wanton cruelties and discrimination historically inflicted upon black veterans in the South have always seemed to me the very lowest, most despicable, stupidest part of America's sad racial history.

Thanks to Mr. Blight for his insightful review of this book, which puts into clear perspective the Post-WWII history of racism and its pervasiveness in the southern judicial system. Without the courage and moral conviction of men like Judge Waring, progress in civil rights would have been greatly delayed. Today, we need more men of courage in our judicial system, from local courts to the Supreme Court. It is up to the American people to demand the restoration of civil rights, and particularly voting rights, that have been undermined by Republican governors and legislatures in red states.

My father, a proud African-American captain in the US Army in WWll, told us many times the story of how he and my mother were pulled over, by the local police, in their car in Ft. Benning, Georgia, while he was waiting to be sent overseas. He was in uniform and had the "audacity" to question being pulled over. They noted that he must be an "uppity Northerner" by his "accent". He was forcibly removed and taken to the local jail house while my mother was left by the road in the car. She was, as you can imagine, riddled with fear not knowing if he would return alive. Many hours later he, thankfully, did. Other stories from WWll made their way to our dinner table conversations yet this was the most harrowing memory of all.

Living down here in the South there is the intense atmosphere of nostalgia for the Confederacy. That it is just halftime between the Civil War and when folks can reclaim their birthrights as white folks Op-eds can endlessly write about disenfranchised white voters and how they voted for Trump out of frustration and alienation. But there are a great many more voters down here who are doing economically fine and the racism of the GOP and Trump in particular was the appeal We are a long, long way off.

Extremely disturbing to see how we have come, and how far we have to go. There should be monuments Sergeant Woodard and Judge Waring.

This book touches on the central problem of American society, as outlined by Annette Gordon-Reed, Charles Warren Professor of American Legal History at Harvard Law School and Professor of History at Harvard University. Writing in the Foreign Affairs Journal, February 2018, in her article “America’s Original Sin, Slavery and the Legacy of White Supremacy” https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2017-12-12/americas-original-sin she quotes historian Edmund Morgan who argued that racially based slavery, rather than being a contradiction in a country that prided itself on freedom, made the freedom of white people possible. “The system that put black people at the bottom of the social heap tamped down class divisions among whites. Without a large group of people who would always rank below the level of even the poorest, most disaffected white person, white unity could not have persisted. Grappling with the legacy of slavery, therefore, requires grappling with the white supremacy that preceded the founding of the United States and persisted after the end of legalized slavery.” And persists today.

Would that the President read this book. Did I just write this? In my dreams. Sigh.

Judge Gergel's story about one of his predecessors also highlights how quickly the Democratic party split from its segregationist core once the racial violence in former Confederate states became widely known. That rift became formal only 2 years after the Woodard case, in 1948, at the Democratic national convention that nominated President Truman. The Republican party's long march toward winking at segregaton also began there, but it quickly shifted into a sprint in 1980 when Ronald Reagan launched his run for the presidency in Mississippi where three young civil rights workers were murdered in 1964.

My father who died in 2009 shared with a story while was a member of the Army Air Core which the start of what is now the United States Air Force. Being a young black man from the north he had no idea of how bad black people treated in the south. He said a member of his unit was beat to death because did not show proper respect for a white person. The tragedy about that is that under the trump administration we are back there again.

I can't help but consider Isaac Woodard's mother, pictured in the photo with the review. I can't imagine what she and the rest of the family suffered right along with Isaac after sending their son off to fight in the war initiated by a country that cared little for them. Can one even fathom how much the family's lives changed as a result of this horrible injustice to Sgt. Woodard. America is a brutal, awful place for people of color, in 1946 as well as 2019.

The Old South was founded on and built on racial exploitation and brutality. Its churches, which condoned and justified slavery, and its courts and legal systems, all committed to cruelty and torture under legal and religious fictions, were outrages against decency. The White Supremacists of today, and the politicians and charlatans like Trump, who wink and nod in approval of their bestial hatreds, declare themselves not fit to live in the world of today or to be citizens of the United States.

I remember vividly how Bill Douglas tried to utilize the14th Amendment to extend Federal due process to combat racist State statutes and how he was castigated as being an "activist Judge" States rights was the much to be regretted concession necessary to allow formation of the Republic. In retrospect, we mightily be better off if we had paid the tea tax. Just look at where States rights and refusal to pay taxes have brought us.

A reminder of why I still pay the NYT subscription.

Thank you for bringing this book to our attention. I need to reread Simple Justice and examples like the one shared here to bring more detail and relevancy for the Civil Rights Movement for my students.

A wonderful review on a most vital subject. I immediately penned it in at the top of my BUY NOW list.

It is somewhat discouraging to see how long it has taken to end white supremacy in the United States. South Africa, the former poster-boy of racism, overcame it’s apartheid in the last century. The fight against inequality is a constant, multi-generational battle with backsliding like (Holder’13) a threat. This book is a reminder of how far we’ve come and how far there is still to go.

Thank you , Professor Blight , for researching and writing this book. In light of current events, it is especially timely to remember that when people understand the inhumanity of Jim Crow attitudes, some may be able to change their mind and behavior toward the racism which is both implicit and explicit in our culture.

This is a well-written review of a book that I must read. Mr. Blight has already demonstrated his insight into the fabric of the Jim Crow South (see”Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory,” his 2001 book on the period of Reconstruction). I had already encountered stories of the bravery and moral certitude of Judge Waring of South Carolina in “Speak Now Against the Day: The Generation Before the Civil Rights Movement in the South” by John Egerton, but this review makes me want to know more about him.

This is a serious amount of outrage and grief to process. Five books sent to five conservative Supreme Court justices is an investment in Justice that I am willing to make. Perhaps you will join me. A ton of books is hard to ignore.

The Shelby case gave the green light to states to begin the unraveling of the entire Civil Rights movement. Along with Citizens United, it has elevated an era of racial hatred that has led to the place we now find ourselves. What else are we prepared to lose...or to fight for?

We've been going at this a long time. Sometimes the rights of black people in the south are honored more and sometimes less as the fashion in legal analysis in the supreme court blows in the wind. There is only one way to settle the question of whether all men are created equal in this country and that is through force. The force of central government that backs up the plain constitutional mandate of equality with federal law, federal marshals, and federal penalties that override the arguments for states rights. The courage to do this has only made itself manifest during the civil war and later during the 1960's. If we want to have a true America we must have the courage to take a side and demand it and pay the price. This is not a political problem and it never was, it is a revolutionary problem, a promise made in 1776 which has not been kept. And every generation since has lived out the turmoil of this unanswered question. Are we going to play this game forever or are we going to fix it once and for all? Are we going to define what America should be or are we going to let it continue to fail into what embarrasses us all and shames us with our silence? We have become observers instead of activists, compromisers instead of patriots, we have let the political machine roam unguided through the distractions of money and social media when we have always had the power to fix this in our hands. The moment has waited for its leader for a long time, how long are we going to wait?