TRAILER: Orson Welles and the Blind Soldier

The 1946 blinding of Isaac Woodard, Jr., a Black veteran attacked by a white police officer hours after his honorable discharge, serves as the catalyst for a high-stakes investigation into racial violence in the Jim Crow South. Initially shrouded in mystery with no known location or suspect, the case gained national momentum when radio personality Orson Welles utilized his broadcast platform to hunt for the unidentified "Officer X." This public campaign for accountability transformed a local atrocity into a national scandal, pressuring the legal system and ultimately influencing the desegregation of the United States military. Through dramatic archival recordings and witness testimony, the narrative traces how media activism and the brutalization of a uniformed soldier forced a federal confrontation with systemic injustice, marking a pivotal turning point in the early civil rights movement.