By MIKE TEAL
Seventy years ago today, Orson Welles used his 15-minute Commentaries radio program to embark on what would prove to be perhaps the strongest and, in retrospect, most significant political stand of his life.
Welles used the airwaves to try and track down the South Carolina police officer responsible for the blinding with a blackjack of Isaac Woodard, an African-American World War II veteran.
Welles devoted his July 28, 1946 program to reading Woodard’s affidavit and vowing to bring the officer responsible to justice. He continued his crusade in four subsequent Sunday afternoon broadcasts.
“There is a price for everything — there is nothing that does not have a cost… What does it cost to be a Negro,” Welles asked listeners. “In Macon, South Carolina, it cost a man his eyes.”
The publicity that Welles stirred prompted the Truman administration to launch an investigation, which led to Police Chief Lynwood Shull and several officers being indicted.
“The NAACP felt that these broadcasts did more than anything else to prompt the Justice Department to act on the case,” the Museum of Broadcasting stated in its 1988 exhibit Orson Welles on the Air: The Radio Years.
On trial in federal court, Shull claimed self-defense in beating Woodard and was acquitted by the all-white jury after brief deliberations in November 1946.
It is believed the Woodard case had an impact on Truman, who made a historic speech to the NAACP in 1947 and a year later desegregated the U.S. military and submitted a civil rights plan to Congress.
Woodard moved to New York City after the trial. He died at the age 73 at a Veterans Administration hospital in the Bronx on September 23, 1992 and was buried with military honors at Calverton National Cemetery. Shull died five years later in South Carolina at the age 95, never punished for his actions.
Lear Radio had sponsored Commentaries from its debut in September 1945, but bailed in June 1946 because of low ratings. Welles’s pay was cut from $1,700 to $50 per show and ABC continued the weekly series without a sponsor. It was during this period Welles launched his crusade on behalf of Woodard.
In October 1946, with no new sponsor, ABC dropped Commentaries. It marked the end of Welles’s radio career in the U.S.
Those broadcasts, considered the pinnacle of Welles’ political activism, can be streamed online, courtesy of Indiana University in Bloomington, at orsonwelles.indiana.edu
The original Commentaries radio broadcast from July 28, 1946 and the BBC Sketch Book television program where Welles recalled the Woodard case nine years later can be found below:
Commentaries – July 28, 1946
Sketch Book – May 1955
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