New Books In African American Studies

In his new book Unexampled Courage: The Blinding of Sgt. Isaac Woodard and the Awakening of President Harry S. Truman and Judge J. Waties Waring (Sarah Crichton Books, 2019), District Judge Richard M. Gergel asks pertinent questions for the Summer of 2020. How do tragic events awaken white people to the violence of structural racism? What do white people do about it? How do black leaders shape their agendas? Unexampled Courage connects the stories of Isaac Woodard, Harry Truman, and J. Waties Waring to illustrate how one incident fits into the larger history of civil rights. On February 12, 1946, Sergeant Isaac Woodard was discharged from the United States military after serving in World War II. While traveling home by bus, Woodard, one of the 900,000 African American men to serve in WWII, was pulled off the bus and arrested for speaking disrespectfully to the white bus driver. While in the custody of police in Batesburg, South Carolina, Sergeant Woodard was beaten and blinded. Viewed in isolation, the blindi