Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents

by Isabel Wilkerson

After the war ended, in February 1946, Sgt. Isaac Woodard, Jr., was riding a Greyhound bus home to North Carolina from Augusta, Georgia, where he had been honorably discharged, having served in the Pacific theater. At a stop along the way, Woodard asked the bus driver if he could step off the bus to relieve himself. The driver told him to sit down, that he didn’t have time to wait. Woodard stood up to the driver and told him, “I am a man just like you.” Woodard had been out of the country and away from Jim Crow for three years, had served his country and taken on “a degree of assertiveness and self-confidence that most southern whites were not accustomed to nor prepared to accept,” in the words of the southern author and judge Richard Gergel. The driver backed down for the time being, told him to “go ahead then and hurry back.” But at the next stop, outside Aiken, South Carolina, the bus driver notified the police.