So in a version of The Eyes of Orson Welles that blessedly doesn’t exist, we’d be forced to hear Cousins ask Welles, “And what did you think, Orson, of the shooting of Jacob Blake in the city in which you were born?”
This is certain because one portion of the film spotlights Welles’ now-forgotten efforts to help a black man assaulted by police achieve justice.
In 1946, Welles focused five episodes of his 15-minute radio program Commentaries on what happened to Isaac Woodard:
Having been discharged from active duty in the Pacific that year, this U.S. Army Sergeant was on a Greyhound bus, heading home to South Carolina. Woodard asked the bus to stop for bathroom break. The driver refused. Words were exchanged and, at the next stop, he was removed from the bus by police, including local Chief Lynwood Shull. Still in uniform, Woodard was beaten so severely that he was blinded for life.
Woody Guthrie wrote an even more appalling than usual “ballad” about Isaac Woodard — the lyrics make William McGonagall sound like Philip Larkin — but fortunately he doesn’t get to take credit for what happened next: the NAACP said it was Welles’ series of broadcasts that catalyzed a Justice Department investigation into the atrocity.
Not surprisingly, an all-white jury acquitted Chief Shull, but it is widely thought that President Truman was so troubled by the case that it helped inspire his decision to desegregate the U.S. military two years later.
Read the whole thing.