On Feb. 12, 1946, Tech. Sgt. Isaac Woodard Jr. boarded a bus in Georgia to return home to his wife in South Carolina after completing service in New Guinea and the Philippines. During the ride, Woodard, who was black, asked the bus driver if he would have time to “take a piss” at the next stop. The driver, objecting to Woodard’s language, said, “Boy, go on back and sit down and keep quiet and don’t be talking out so loud.” Fresh from serving his country in wartime, the soldier shot back: “Goddamn it, talk to me like I’m talking to you. I’m a man just like you.” An hour later during a scheduled stop in Batesburg, S.C., the incensed bus driver called over local law-enforcement officers, telling them that the soldier’s foul mouth offended a white female passenger. The police confronted Woodard and dragged him out of sight of the other passengers to unleash a barrage of baton strikes and punches to the face that ruptured his eyeballs. Still in uniform, he was taken to jail and held overnight. The next morning, his eyesight now permanently gone, the police gave him a hot towel and some eye drops and left him at the nearest veterans’ hospital. Woodard survived war overseas only to be blinded by the war at home.

Civil rights leaders met with President Harry Truman seven months later to encourage him to end lynch-mob violence against black Americans. After hearing stories of a black veteran and his wife who were executed in a hail of bullets in Georgia, another mutilated with a meat cleaver and blowtorch in Louisiana and the violent blinding of Woodard, Truman’s face fell pale. He rose from his chair and exclaimed: “My God! I had no idea it was as terrible as that! We’ve got to do something!” The next day Truman informed his attorney general that policy was needed to prevent lynchings and, in December, Truman created the President’s Committee on Civil Rights to look into racial violence and civil rights. A year later, the committee published its report proposing a number of reforms, including the abolishment of poll taxes, anti-lynching legislation and exempting members of the armed forces from segregation within the military and in society at-large. Though anti-lynching legislation died in Congress and the poll tax was deemed a constitutional issue, Truman could act on the desegregation of the armed forces on his own.

July 26 marks the 70th anniversary of the signing of Executive Order 9981, Truman’s landmark directive to desegregate the United States military — and the signature achievement of his nascent civil rights program. He declared it was his administration’s policy that “there shall be equality of treatment and opportunity for all persons in the armed services without regard to race, color, religion or national origin.” Truman took this action despite significant resistance from defense leadership. Kenneth Royall, then secretary of the Army, argued that the Army shouldn’t be used as an “instrument of social evolution.” The Marine Corps commandant, Clifton Cates, complained that “the problem of segregation is not the responsibility of the Armed Forces but is a problem of the nation,” and that it was dangerous to use the military to change the nation’s racial politics. Overruling the Pentagon, Truman employed the military in a racial-desegregation social experiment in hopes of improving the American one. His use of executive powers signaled a commitment to a more inclusive version of the United States.