Every day, federal district court judges write opinions of varying length. Very few judges write books, though.

Richard M. Gergel is an exception. Appointed to the District Court for the District of South Carolina by President Obama in 2010, Judge Gergel recently authored an excellent book tracing the history of Briggs v. Elliott, one of the five cases consolidated in the Supreme Court under the title Brown v. Board of Education.

Entitled Unexampled Courage: The Blinding of Sgt. Isaac Woodard and the Awakening of America, the book skillfully weaves together the stories of three persons: Sgt. Isaac Woodard, President Harry Truman and U. S. District Judge J. Waties Waring.

Isaac Woodard was one of nine children born in 1919 to black sharecroppers in Fairfield County, South Carolina, an impoverished rural county in the central part of the state. He left school after the fifth grade, working various jobs to help support his family.

After World War II began, he joined the armed forces in the fall of 1942 and served in the Pacific theater, loading and unloading ships as part of a racially segregated support unit in New Guinea. His unit took intense fire from the Japanese, and for his gallantry he received the American Campaign Medal, the Asiatic-Pacific Campaign Medal and the World War II Victory Medal. He entered the Army as a private and rose to the rank of sergeant.

After being honorably discharged in February 1946 at Camp Gordon, Georgia, Sgt. Woodard boarded a Greyhound bus at Augusta, Georgia, headed to his home in Winnsboro, South Carolina, for a long-anticipated reunion with his wife Rosa. The bus was filled with demobilized soldiers traveling in uniform and made numerous stops in small towns to allow men to get off at their destination.

In those days, Greyhound buses had no toilet facilities. At one of the stops, Sgt. Woodard asked the bus driver to allow him to step off the bus briefly to relieve himself. The bus driver initially refused, but after an acrimonious exchange finally relented.

At the next stop, though, the bus driver decided to rid himself of Sgt. Woodard. In Batesburg, South Carolina, the bus driver sought the assistance of police chief Lynwood Shull. He asked the police chief to arrest Sgt. Woodard for being drunk and disorderly. When Sgt. Woodard got off the bus, he was taken into custody and struck by the police chief with his blackjack. Sgt. Woodard resisted and was beaten repeatedly, including being poked in both eyes by the sharp points of the blackjack.

Sgt. Woodard spent the night in the Batesburg jail. When he awoke the next morning, he could not see. He was eventually taken to the Veterans Administration hospital in Columbia, South Carolina, where he remained for two months. But there was no treatment which could restore his vision. He was now blind for life.

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) became aware of this incident and sought to help Sgt. Woodard. The NAACP persuaded the well-known actor Orson Welles, who at that time had a national radio program, to make the nation aware of what had happened to Sgt. Woodard. With the help of Welles and other celebrities like heavyweight boxing champion Joe Louis, the NAACP raised thousands of dollars to assist the veteran meet his expenses and pay his medical bills.

The most significant result of the NAACP’s efforts, though, came when its executive secretary Walter White met with President Harry Truman in September of 1946 to discuss the racially motivated violence and lynchings then occurring through the South. White told the president, himself a veteran of World War I, about the blinding of Sgt. Woodard. According to Judge Gergel’s book, “Truman sat riveted and became visibly agitated and angered . . . [A]n obviously distressed president responded, ‘My God! I had no idea it was so terrible as that! We have got to do something.’”

Perhaps recalling his days as Captain Truman who had commanded a company of soldiers during the First World War, the president was especially outraged that Sgt. Woodard was a veteran returning home from three years of service in defense of the country. He instructed his Attorney General, Tom Clark, to initiate federal criminal charges against the Batesburg police chief Lynwood Shull. The case was prosecuted without enthusiasm by the South Carolina U. S. Attorney Claud Sapp, who was assisted by local FBI agents who had done a half-hearted job of investigation. The inevitable result was a not guilty verdict rendered by an all-white jury which deliberated for only 28 minutes.

The judge who presided over this trial was the Honorable J. Waties Waring, an eighth-generation Charlestonian born in 1880, whose father had served in the Confederate army. The jury may not have been impressed by the evidence in the Shull case, but Judge Waring was deeply disturbed by the evidence and by the jury verdict. He later described the case as his “baptism of fire.”

The last half of Judge Gergel’s book is devoted to Judge Waring’s transformation from a man who had always accepted the Southern “way of life” to a man who was not afraid to play a leading role in changing that way of life, even if it meant complete ostracism by his friends and his community. After issuing several judicial rulings that upended the racial status quo in South Carolina, in 1951 Judge Waring confronted the case that would cement his place in American history — Briggs v. Elliott — a case that challenged the constitutionality of the South Carolina law requiring school segregation.

Beginning in the 1930s, the NAACP Legal and Educational Defense Fund, headed by Thurgood Marshall, had implemented a strategy of attacking the inadequacy of educational opportunities and facilities for Black children. Until 1951, though, the attack had focused on equalizing these opportunities and facilities without a direct frontal challenge to the constitutionality of segregated schools.

The initial complaint Marshall filed in Briggs v. Elliott sought to equalize the facilities for Black students in rural Clarendon County, one of the poorest counties in South Carolina. During a private meeting with Marshall and during the pretrial conference in Briggs, Judge Waring told the NAACP chief counsel that he should consider a broader challenge to the South Carolina statute that mandated segregated schools. Under intense prodding by Judge Waring and with the approval of his Clarendon County clients, Marshall filed a new lawsuit asking the court to rule that the South Carolina statute violated the 14th Amendment guarantee of Equal Protection of the Law.

Because the case now involved a constitutional challenge to a state statute, it was heard by a three-judge panel, of which Judge Waring was one member. After a trial in which there was evidence of the long-term deleterious effect of segregated schools on the development of children, the three-judge court issued a 2-1 decision in favor of the defendants, requiring them to equalize educational opportunities for Black students in Clarendon County but refusing to hold school segregation itself unconstitutional.

Judge Waring wrote a lengthy dissenting opinion. The reasoning and analysis expressed in his opinion were mirrored three years later in the Supreme Court’s epic opinion in Brown v. Board of Education.

The title of Judge Gergel’s book is taken from a passage in Judge Waring’s dissenting opinion, in which the judge stated:

[T]hese 66 plaintiffs have not merely expended their time and money in order to test this important Constitutional question, but they have shown unexampled courage in bringing and presenting this cause at their own expense in the fact of the long established and age-old pattern of the way of life which the State of South Carolina has adopted and practiced and lived in since and as a result of the institution of human slavery.

Judge Waring paid a heavy price for his deviation from the accepted mores of South Carolina. In 1952 he retired from the bench and moved to New York City, where he lived until his death in 1968 at age 88. As Judge Gergel’s book makes clear, though, Judge Waring never regretted his change of thinking on racial issues and was proud of his role in helping change American history.

Eventually, the powers-that-be in South Carolina have come to appreciate his accomplishments. South Carolina Sen. Fritz Hollings helped gain an appropriation for an addition to the historic federal courthouse in Charleston in the 1980s, and it was initially named for him. In 2014, however, former Sen. Hollings and other South Carolina officials were successful in getting the name changed to the J. Waties Waring Judicial Center. |||

Author’s Note: Judge Gergel’s book was the basis for a two-hour episode in the television series American Experience, first broadcast on PBS on March 30, 2021 and currently available on the PBS website at www.pbs.org/video/the-blinding-of-isaac-woodard-knf0hq/.

On May 21, 2024, Judge Gergel’s book was featured on C-SPAN’s American History series. The program was sponsored by the Supreme Court Historical Society and was presided over by Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who introduced Judge Gergel. The program is about an hour long and can be viewed at www.c-span.org/video/?536324-1/unexampled-courage.

John P. Williams is of counsel with the Nashville law firm Tune, Entrekin & White. He received the Justice Joseph W. Henry award for outstanding legal writing for articles published in the Tennessee Bar Journal in 2003 and 2014.

NOTES
1. 347 U. S. 497 (1954).
2. This book was published in hardcover in 2019 by Sarah Crichton Books, an imprint of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. The title of the hardcover version is Unexampled Courage: The Blinding of Sgt. Isaac Woodard and the Awakning of President Harry S. Truman and Judge J. Waties Waring. The paperback version of the book was published in 2020 by Picador, also an imprint of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. It is not clear why the title was changed.
3. Richard Gergel, Unexampled Courage: The Blinding of Sgt. Isaac Woodard and the Awakening of America (Picador: New York, 2020), at 79.
4. Gergel, at 128.
5. Gergel, at 132.
6. The decision is reported at 98 F. Supp. 529 (E.D. S.C. 1951)
7. Judge Waring’s dissenting opinion is reported at 98 F. Supp. 538-548.
8. 98 F. Supp. 540.