On February 12, 1946, Sergeant Isaac Woodard, a returning, battlefield-decorated African American soldier, was removed from a Greyhound bus in Batesburg, South Carolina, after he challenged the bus driver’s disrespectful treatment of him. Woodard, in uniform, was arrested by the local police chief, Lynwood Shull, and beaten and blinded while in custody.

Gergen outlines how the blinding of Sergeant Isaac Woodard changed the course of America’s civil rights history and played a role in the events that led President Harry Truman to establish the first presidential commission on civil rights and order an end to segregation in the U.S. armed forces.