Photo: Joseph Gergel
Judge Richard M. Gergel ’79, T’75
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waiting Senate confirmation to a seat on the U.S. District Court for the District of South Carolina in 2010, Richard Gergel, then a litigator in Columbia, found himself with time on his hands. He decided to read all he could about J. Waties Waring, the first of the great Southern civil rights judges who presided in the Charleston Federal Courthouse from 1942 to 1952. Waring had somehow transformed from a product of the segregated South — his father fought for the Confederacy — to a hero of the civil rights movement who eventually declared segregation “an evil that must eradicated.” Gergel, who was assigned in August 2010 to the Charleston Courthouse where Waring presided, was intrigued. What motivated this massive change in perspective? Although Waring’s transformation had been documented by a few historians, he remained largely an enigma, with the central question of what had led to his extraordinary journey on race and justice remaining largely unaddressed. Gergel’s curiosity launched a seven-year project that led all the way to the White House and the records of the Library of Congress, National Archives, and numerous research libraries. As it turned out, Waring had presided over a 1946 civil rights prosecution that had been initiated as a result of the personal intervention of
President Harry Truman. That case is the starting point for Gergel’s new book, Unexampled Courage: The Blinding of Sgt. Isaac Woodard and the Awakening of President Harry S. Truman and Judge J. Waties Waring (Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2019). “The original focus of my research was on what changed Judge Waring,” says Gergel, whose chambers are, fittingly, located in the recently renamed J. Waties Waring Judicial Center in Charleston. Waring was a national figure in the 1940s and 1950s, and he was often asked the same question by journalists of that time. But, like many judges, Waring was reticent to speak about the cases that came before him. So during his lifetime, he gave a stock answer: “‘While on the bench, I developed a passion for justice.’” Gergel was not satisfied: “That told me nothing.” Gergel unearthed hundreds of news articles in the course of his research — many from the African American press — as well as investigative files of the FBI and the Department of Justice, Waring’s personal papers at Howard University, and various oral histories that helped him uncover the origins of Waring’s remarkable evolution. Gergel also discovered a meeting between President Truman and civil rights leaders in September 1946, where the president first learned of the story of the blinding of Isaac Woodard. Woodard, a
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