While actor/director Orson Welles is mostly known these days for Citizen Kane, his infamous War of t

While actor/director Orson Welles is mostly known these days for Citizen Kane, his infamous War of the World’s radio play, performing in a Transformers movie, and starting an argument over peas, but what is less well known is his work as a social commentator and activist.

Indeed, while his critique of the wealthy in Citizen Kane got him put on a watch-list by the FBI, Welles had been involved in trying to help diversify theatre since 1936, when he worked with an all African American acting company in an adaptation of MacBeth which managed to both win over Shakespeare purists and local activists in Harlem who suspected that Welles was going help made the production insulting towards the actors and the surrounding community.

And in a 1944 column for Free World he talked about the need for social justice and called for “race hate” to be criminalised. The article itself is interesting, especially considering when it was written, here’s a taste:

Race hate isn’t human nature; race hate is the abandonment of human nature. But this is true: we hate whom we hurt and we mistrust whom we betray. There are minority problems simply because minority races are often wronged. Race hate, distilled from the suspicions of ignorance, takes its welcome from the impotent and the godless, comforting these with hellish parodies of what they’ve lost—arrogance to take the place of price, contempt to occupy the spirit emptied of the love of man. There are alibis for the phenomenon—excuses, economic and social—but the brutal fact is simply this: where the racist lie is acceptable there is corruption. Where there is hate there is shame. The human soul receives race hate only in the sickness of guilt.

The Indian is on our conscience, the Negro is on our conscience, the Chinese and the Mexican-American are on our conscience. The Jew is on the conscience of Europe, but our neglect gives us communion in that guilt, so that there dances even here the lunatic spectre of anti-semitism.

This is deplored; it must be fought, and the fight must be won.

The poll tax is regretted; it must be abolished.

And poll tax thinking must be outlawed. This is a time for action. We know that for some ears even the word “action” has a revolutionary twang, and it won’t surprise us if we’re accused in some quarters of inciting to riot. FREE WORLD is very interested in riots. FREE WORLD is very interested in avoiding them.

We call for action against the cause of riots. Law is the best action, the most decisive. We call for laws, then, prohibiting what moral judgment already counts as lawlessness. American law forbids a man the right to take away anothers right. It must be law that groups of men can’t use the machinery of our Republic to limit the rights of other groups—that the vote, for instance, can’t be used to take away the vote.

Additionally, in his 1945 to 46 radio show Orson Welles Commentaries, he used the opportunity to talk about current events, including protesting the 1946 Bikini Atoll atomic test, speaking out against the dissolution of the Office of Price Administration (a service started during World War Two to control prices and rent), and most prominently, denouncing the 1946 assault on African American WWII veteran Isaac Woodard by some white cops in South Carolina.

Woodard was traveling from South Carolina to Georgia by bus, and hours after being honorably discharged, Batesburg (now Batesburg-Leesville) police chief Lynwood Shull and several over officers beat and blinded Woodard after attempting to rob him of $700 (his military pay), fined him $50, and left his injuries untreated so his family were not able to find him until weeks after the attack due to Woodward loosing his memory in addition to his sight.

Initially the NAACP brought the news of the attack to socially progressive news papers and black press, but the organization’s Executive Secretary Walter White and cartoonist Ollie Harrington (recently tasked with building out the NAACP’s public relations) wanted the assault to become national news, so they wrote a letter to Orson explaining what’s up.

And, indeed, with an affidavit from Woodward, Welles read an account by the man about the circumstances leading up to his assault, the attach and the resulting aftermath. The NAACP’s plan to bring Woodward’s attack to a wider international audience succeeded, with Welles covering the subject for four episodes in total and explicitly comparing the conduct of Shull and his men to that of the Nazis in the first episode.

"The boy saw him while he could still see, but of course he had no way of knowing what particular policeman it was who brought the justice of Dachau and Oswiecim to Aiken, South Carolina,” Welles said in that first broadcast. “He was just another white man with a stick, who wanted to teach a Negro boy a lesson—to show a Negro boy where he belonged: In the darkness.”

Naming the policeman Officer X, Welles addressed him directly. “Wash your hands, Officer X. Wash them well. Scrub and scour, you won’t blot out the blood of a blinded war veteran,” Welles said. “Go on, suckle your anonymous moment while it lasts. You’re going to be uncovered. We will blast out your name! We’ll give the world your given name, Officer X. Yes, and your so-called Christian name. It’s going to rise out of the filthy deep like the dead thing it is.”

Welles and the NAACP subsequently worked out the names of the officers responsible, and pressured for Shull and his men to be prosecuted by the Truman administration. And, surprisingly, Harry Truman actually agreed and the racist cops were put on trial for their crime…

…And were found innocent by an all-white jury within 30 minutes. While a pro-segregationist congressman attempted to appeal to J. Edgar Hoover for the FBI to investigate Welles and in his “inflammatory broadcasts“.

The week following the final episode based on Woodard’s case, ABC informed Welles that they were cancelling his show, which would finish airing October 6, 1946.

Despite the lack of success in prosecuting the cops, however, the NAACP had brought enough national attention to the issue of police violence against the African American community to lead Truman establishing the Civil Rights Commission. Additionally, in July 1948 Truman issued two Executive Orders, banning racial discrimination in the military and desegregating the federal government.

Following the trial, Woodard would move to New York City, where he would eventually die in a Veterans Hospital in the Bronx in 1995. Shull would die in his hometown of Batesburg several years later at the age of 95, having faced no legal consequences for his actions.