Racism, The integration of the armed forces, and reaction

 Since Trump stood up at the podium in West Point and made a racist speech that went against about 80 years of American history, and since the NYT, our major newspaper, decided to report it in tones that made it seem like a dignified presidential “shift” of emphasis, then I figure we should publish or disseminate stories about the history of African-Americans in the military, and in the country that they served, and their fates in the Jim Crow America, which has been forthrightly proclaimed by Trump as the America he wants to bring back while being covered and camouflaged by a media that is alternately scared of the monetary opportunities he can block for their mega-corporation owners and stiffened and starched by decades of gushing decorous language that has been slopped day after day over the doings of the powerful. In other words, in the face of a media that takes its task to be making what is happening before our eyes unrecognizable, lets poke holes in it, lets look through it, lets make it recognizable.

My story for today, for instance, to put Trump’s sub-par standup rant in perspective, is to recall this news story from Feb. 12, 1946. This was the day the police arrested a veteran named Sgt. Isaac Woodard, who had committed the awful crime of taking a bus from Camp Gordon in Augusta, Georgia, to his home in Winnsboro, South Carolina. Woodard’s problem was that he wanted to take a leak. A leak. An easy thing for a white man to do, traveling from Augusta, Georgia to Winnsboro, South Carolina, but difficult for a black man to do who does not want to be lynched for using the white man’s bathroom.

Woodard was a black man.

Bathrooms in America and who gets to use them have long been a hot spot. If we create a sadistic system of oppression, one of the enjoyments of the system is denying a person the right and privilege of peeing in a bathroom if it is the wrong bathroom. In this game, if the person pees in the wrong bathroom, we get to string them up. Blacks yesterday, Trans today, it is all good conservative fun.

In Batesburg, South Carolina, Sgt Woodard asked for a bathroom break – and this was allowed by the very rules of the bus. But the bus driver said he could not – referring to the bathroom system that had been set up to torment people like Sgt Woodard – and said bus driver called the police. The police chief named Lynwood Shull and another officer arrived on the scene and hauled Woodard out of the bus, and down to the jail, administering a thorough beating. It was a beating with nightsticks. Woodard made the mistake of taking one of the nightsticks from the beater’s hands. Oh Oh.

As he put it in his affidavit – in a report in the Baltimore Afro-American:

“When we got to the door of the police station, he struck me again and knocked me unconscious. After I commenced to come to myself, he hollered ‘get up’ When I started to get up, he started punching me in my eyes with the end of his billy.”

Now this bit of policing might have produced no stir, save that black newspaper got hold it. And they kept on publishing it, which eventually came to the attention of Harry Truman. It was Truman’s pressure on the FBI that produced an investigation. Lynwood Shull was put on trial. This is what Shull said:

“Although he admitted using a blackjack, which “might have landed in his eye or eyes,”, Shull insisted, “I was no harsher than is necessary to complete the arrest.”

Guess who was acquitted by an all white jury?

A question for the ages.

And this is where diversity, aka integration, comes into the story. As after WWI, there were assaults on black soldiers all over the country after WWII. Truman, however, thought that this was not right. And so Truman began to institute the first significant blow against segregation since the reconstruction. He ordered the Armed Forces to be integrated.

This, of course, is a backstory that the media gives a shit about as we get the reincarnation of Lynwood Shull as President, blathering on at West Point.

Lets not pretend, here, that the ultimate victims of Trumpism are country-clubbers from Harvard. The ultimate goal is to make beatings like that suffered by Woodard exemplary. Every time an organisation dissolves its “DEI” initiative, it is raising that nightstick and giving Woodard another blow in the eyes. Don’t kid yourself that this is not happening.