Via Amin,
They Woke Up the Wrong Man.
“On the cool winter night of February 12, 1946, Isaac Woodard Jr. climbed aboard a Greyhound bus in Augusta, Georgia, on his last leg home to Winnsboro, South Carolina, from a journey that had begun in the Philippines several weeks before,” Gergel writes. “Woodard, who was 26 years old, had just completed an arduous three-year tour in the U.S. Army, where he served in the Pacific theater, earned a battle star for unloading ships under enemy fire during the New Guinea campaign, and won promotions, ultimately to the rank of sergeant.”
A disagreement of some kind happened between Woodard and the driver of the bus he was traveling on that night. They eventually pulled over along the way and the driver alerted the local police in a town called Batesburg that a black passenger was being disruptive and you already know where this is going. Woodard was almost immediately beaten and ultimately blinded by a police officer later identified as Lynwood Shull.
In July of that year Orson Welles — who had released Citizen Kane a few years earlier — read from Woodard’s own account about what transpired that night on his radio program after it was brought to his attention by the NAACP and others.
Welles's reading and call to action are incredibly good.
The writer's comments here ring true:
You’ve probably seen a lot of very sincere concern about “riots” of late from people who swear “they’re as liberal as they come, but...” (There are few bigger lies than that told by white libs by the way.) This is a different thing than concern from the people who live in these communities to be clear. I’m talking instead about the hand wringing over what the property damage and vandalism and so on might do as the election approaches as if Joe fucking Biden’s electoral prospects are the first or even tenth thing on anyone’s mind when they take to the streets to protest injustice and demand their own civil rights.
I will never forget White people complaining about people fighting back against Nazis — actual Nazis! — at Charlottesville because what older White voters might think. People of color have a right to dignity and safety, and the path there does involve some electoral politics, but not at the cost of…their dignity and safety.