The Legacy of Bob Woodson
Years ago, after visiting the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C., sociologist and civil rights leader Bob Woodson wrote about a display that “stopped me in my tracks.” The 1980s were, according to the exhibit, “years of paradox.” While many blacks pursued advanced degrees and entered the professions, others existed in poor neighborhoods filled with drugs and violence. Who or what was to blame for the contrast?
According to the museum, the answer was Ronald Reagan, who cut many social programs.
Woodson, who founded the Woodson Center in Washington, D.C., “to empower low-income communities to solve their own problems,” didn’t buy it. “Is it truly institutional racism and heartless policies that have resulted in conditions today?” he asked.
On Wednesday, the Woodson Center announced that Bob Woodson, a recipient of the MacArthur ‘Genius’ Fellowship, a Presidential Citizens Medal, the Freedom Leadership Award, and the 2018 William Wilberforce Award—among many others—had died at the age of 89. As the Center wrote in their announcement,
From his early days as a civil rights activist to his decades at the Woodson Center, Bob built a body of work that reframed how America thinks about poverty, race, and community. He stood steadfast for the nation’s founding values and virtues, including faith, hard work, personal responsibility, the foundational importance of healthy families and communities, and the ability of everyone to shun a victimhood mentality and become agents of their own uplift . . . He has left behind a generation of leaders, revitalized neighborhoods, and a civil rights tradition centered on the people it was always meant to serve…
He didn’t just build an organization. He built relationships, and those relationships built a movement.
Woodson questioned the dominant narrative about race and oppression. Instead, he championed innovation, entrepreneurship, personal responsibility, and family as the key to economic empowerment and community restoration. In fact, the 2018 Wilberforce Award ceremony featured academic luminaries, political heavyweights, and former leaders of rival gangs all honoring what he accomplished. Woodson’s approach was fact-based, not ideological. We interviewed Woodson for the Wilberforce Award. As he put it,
If the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow laws are responsible for the decline in marriage and the rise in poverty and out-of-wedlock births in the black community, then why, during the Great Depression, did blacks have the highest marriage rate?
He also wondered why, during the decades when blacks “had little political power and faced legalized discrimination, did they still make significant economic progress?”
Prior to the 1960s, Woodson said, African Americans “tapped their internal capacity . . . Hard work, cooperation, academic performance, and moral excellence were elements of a strategy to achieve.”
He pointed to the history of black churches and civic institutions as models of what African Americans could achieve. When denied access to banks, they built their own. When insurance companies turned them away, black churches created “burial societies” and mutual-aid societies to assist the poor.
Tragically, Woodson said, that “rich history of self-determination” was “abandoned” in the 1960s. The only way forward, he concluded, was “a return to a culture based on self-determination, personal responsibility, and strong moral values.” Woodson put these ideas into action, founding the Center for Neighborhood Enterprise, which became known as the Woodson Center. The best way to help the poor become self-sufficient, he believed, was by placing control of community development, not in the hands of faraway bureaucrats, but in the hands of community leaders.
Woodson Center programs spread all over the country, including the Violence-Free Zone, which sent young adult advisors into schools to mentor youth. At one Richmond, Virginia high school, arrests of students dropped 38% after adopting a VFZ program. A Dallas high school that recorded 133 gang incidents before bringing in VFZ reported zero the following year. Woodson Center programs have also transformed the lives of former drug addicts, prostitutes, and the homeless.
According to Woodson, the secret to his success was that “Faith in God transforms the inside and that faith transforms the outside.” The faith of Bob Woodson, that brought so much transformation to the inside and outside for so many, is now sight. Learn about the Woodson Center’s mission, vision, and programs at woodsoncenter.org.
Photo Credit: ©Woodson Center
John Stonestreet is President of the Colson Center for Christian Worldview, and radio host of BreakPoint, a daily national radio program providing thought-provoking commentaries on current events and life issues from a biblical worldview. John holds degrees from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School (IL) and Bryan College (TN), and is the co-author of Making Sense of Your World: A Biblical Worldview.
The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of CrosswalkHeadlines.
BreakPoint is a program of the Colson Center for Christian Worldview. BreakPoint commentaries offer incisive content people can't find anywhere else; content that cuts through the fog of relativism and the news cycle with truth and compassion. Founded by Chuck Colson (1931 – 2012) in 1991 as a daily radio broadcast, BreakPoint provides a Christian perspective on today's news and trends. Today, you can get it in written and a variety of audio formats: on the web, the radio, or your favorite podcast app on the go.
