Robert L. Woodson, civil rights activist, community leader, and noted conservative author, died peacefully Wednesday at the age of 89. Woodson spent more than six decades challenging the poverty industry he believed exploited the very communities it claimed to serve. In 1981, he founded the National Center for Neighborhood Enterprise in Washington — later renamed the Woodson Center.
“Bob Woodson was more than the founder of an organization,” the Woodson Center’s statement reads. “He was a visionary and civil rights leader whose life transformed countless communities from the inside out. For more than six decades, his life’s work rested on a single, unwavering conviction: that the people closest to a problem are best positioned to solve it. That conviction shaped an entirely different way of understanding poverty, community, and the latent power of the people.”
Woodson’s philosophy put him at odds with much of the civil rights establishment. While the civil rights industry monetized grievance, Woodson rolled up his sleeves to produce results for black communities.
In 1997, after a 12-year-old boy was murdered by feuding gangs in a southeast Washington housing project, he brokered a truce — holding meetings at his own office.
He worked with Philadelphia’s House of Umoja, which invited rival gang members into a family home and watched gang-related deaths in the city fall from 40 a year to one.
WAKE UP BLACK AMERICA. EXCELLENCE IS OUR INHERITANCE
He built violence-free zones in the nation’s most troubled schools, betting on ex-cons and reformed gang members as the real agents of change.
In his last published essay, “Wake up, black America. Excellence is our inheritance,” which appeared in the Washington Examiner in early May as a response to the recent Southern Poverty Law Center controversy, Woodson wrote: “The cause of civil rights remains one of the noblest defenses of human dignity in American history. But the movement has, more often than we admit, been commodified. What began as a mission rooted in sacrifice has, in some quarters, hardened into an industry rooted in exploitation. When the suffering of a people becomes a fundraising hook, the incentive shifts from solving problems to sustaining grievances.”
America lost one of its great leaders Wednesday, just shy of its 250th birthday. But his legacy will echo for many birthdays to come.