In 1946, Isaac Woodard, a Black army sergeant on his way home to South Carolina after serving in WWII, was pulled from a bus for arguing with the driver. The local chief of police savagely beat him, leaving him unconscious and permanently blind. The shocking incident made national headlines and, when the police chief was acquitted by an all-white jury, the blatant injustice would change the course of American history. Based on Richard Gergel’s book Unexampled Courage, the film details how the crime led to the racial awakening of President Harry Truman, who desegregated federal offices and the military two years later. The event also ultimately set the stage for the Supreme Court’s landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, which finally outlawed segregation in public schools and jumpstarted the modern civil rights movement. Please be weary of the connection of black lives to social change. It seems as though as if its some sick, twisted currency that can be exchanged for a social reset. More recently it’s George Floyd…According to a McKinsey report released in December 2020 (and updated on the one-year anniversary of Floyd’s murder), more than 1,100 organizations committed a total of $200 billion to racial justice initiatives between June 2020 and May 2021. McKinsey’s analyses showed that nearly 90% of those pledges came from financial institutions. Tech companies also made grand announcements. For instance, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg pledged $10 million to “groups working on racial justice,” which at the time was the company’s single-largest donation. Intel committed $7.6 million, Apple gave $100 million, and Google put up $370 million, to name a few…FOH. Bless the soul of Isaac Woodard.