In honor of Black History Month, Mr. Robert L. Woodson Sr. joins the She Thinks podcast to discuss the Civil Rights Movement and how it contrasts with today’s social justice movement, why he launched 1776 Unites, and community-led solutions to violence in poor communities, including Voices of Black Mothers United Network.
Mr. Woodson is the founder and president of the Woodson Center, an organization committed to helping residents of low-income neighborhoods address the problems of their communities for over 30 years. He is a former civil rights activist, headed the National Urban League Department of Criminal Justice, and been a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Foundation for Public Policy Research.
Transcript
Beverly Hallberg:
Hey everyone, it’s Beverly Hallberg. Welcome to a special pop-up episode of She Thinks, your favorite podcast from the Independent Women’s Forum, where we talk with women and sometimes men about the policy issues that impact you and the people you care about most. Enjoy.
Patrice:
Hello, my name is Patrice Onwuka. I’m a senior policy analyst at the Independent Women’s Forum. February is Black History Month, a time when we reflect on the achievements of Blacks in America.
Our guest today is Mr. Robert Woodson, founder, and president of the Woodson Center. This organization has helped residents of low-income neighborhoods address the problems of their communities for over 30 years. Mr. Woodson is a former civil rights activist. He has headed the National Urban League Department of Criminal Justice, and been a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Foundation for Public Policy Research. Mr. Woodson, it is a pleasure to have you on the She Thinks podcast.
Bob:
I’m pleased to be here. Pleased to be here.
Patrice:
Sure. Terrific. Well, sir, you have quite a background. Please tell us your story and why you think it resonates with so many young people.
Bob:
Well, I’m a veteran of the Civil Rights Movement, but I became really disenchanted with the movement, and left the movement in the mid-’60s, following the death of Dr. King. Because I differed with the leadership on issues of forced busing for integration. I believe that that was a wrong strategy, that the opposite of segregation is not integration, it’s desegregation. Because if you conclude that anything is all Black is all bad, then that’s self-defeating. But I also left the moment when I realized that a lot of people who suffered and sacrificed didn’t benefit from the change. In that, I saw there were huge class differences, that we were using the demographics of low-income Blacks to make our case for remedies. When the remedies arrived they benefited the well-educated and upper-income Blacks. So, this is a flaw that I think has adversely affected our ability to fight poverty in America for the last 50 years.
So, I left the movement when I realized that Dr. King said, “What good does it do to have the right to eat in a restaurant of your choice or live in a neighborhood of your choice if you don’t have the economic means to exercise that right?” So, I since then have worked on behalf of low-income people of all races to help them to develop the capacity to both open the doors of opportunity, but also be prepared to walk through those opportunities. So, that has defined me for many years. I don’t believe racism is the biggest problem we’re facing today. Its elitism is the biggest barrier to the poor getting ahead.
Patrice:
You have hit something that I’ve observed quite often with a lot of the solutions we’re seeing. Even, for example, student loan forgiveness which it’s advertised as helping people with… low-income people with college degrees, or even college dropouts. But really it would benefit those who are upper-income earners. I think you hit something really interesting, which is the elitism that so many solutions to poverty actually don’t really address.
I mean, I’m curious, we saw in 2019 that the poverty rates for minorities fell to their lowest recorded levels. For Blacks, it was below 20% for the first time in history. I attribute it to a strong job market. Do you think that it’s… Well, what do you attribute the falling of poverty rates too? We have those lawmakers who say, “Well, we actually need more money, more federal money in anti-poverty programs,” do you agree with that as well?
Bob:
No, we do not. We don’t need more money for anti-poverty programs. When we create a vigorous job market, it is the best anti-poverty fighter in the world is to have a good job market. Tom Howell documents the fact that the biggest drop in poverty occurred between 1940 and 1960. When we had a like 82% in 1940 down to 45% in 1950, and then another 18%. Then when the government started its $22 trillion five-decade-old poverty programs, we were 70 cents for every dollar that we spent on poverty did not go to the poor. It went to those who serve poor people and they asked, “which problems are fund-able, not which ones are solvable?”
So, we really created a commodity out of poor people. As a consequence of that, the poverty level has flattened out for almost 50 years until 2019. Because we have created a perverse incentive for people to be independent and self-sufficient. Now all of this emphasis on government increased government, and so-called institutional racism is the worst combination of circumstances that I can imagine that really threatens the wellbeing of particularly low-income Blacks.
Patrice:
Well, thank you for jumping right to where we’re at today, the Social Justice Movement of today. Just overall, do you think that what we’re seeing today, the Black Lives Matter Movement and the organization itself, does it have any resemblance… is there any resemblance to the Civil Rights Movement that you saw back in the ’50s and ’60s that you were a part of?
Bob:
It’s just the inverse of it. The Civil Rights Movement was fighting for inclusion. We also, wanted it to be judged by our character not the color of our skin. Black Lives Matter is just the inverse of that. They want everything to be judged by the color of their skin. They also want the government to come in and fix every problem they want. They’re also hostile to the very virtues and values that enabled Black Americans to survive slavery and Jim Crow. That is they are hostile to the nuclear family. They say that it’s Eurocentric and therefore racist. They’re hostile to the Christian faith, which is another value that enabled Blacks to survive the nuclear family and self-determination. All of those are antithetical to the Civil Rights Movement. But I think the Black Lives Matter Movement has really hijacked the Civil Rights Movement and weaponized race. I don’t think they care about the welfare of Black people. If they did, they wouldn’t be burning down their businesses and-
Patrice:
I 100% agree with you. What I found frustrating is when watching the looting, and the burning, and the rioting, and then hearing from members of Congress excuse that behavior. Particularly the looting, excusing it as “Well people need to eat, and that’s what they’re, they’re feeding themselves.” Do you buy that argument that poor people turn to looting and rioting because of poverty?
Bob:
Poverty up until 1960 has never been linked to aberrant behavior. Otherwise, we would have sharecroppers rioting in the ’20s and ’30s, but I can’t recall sharecroppers robbing blanks or looting stores just because they poor. That’s just a misnomer. In fact, part of our studies at 1776, we looked at 1930 to 1940 when racism was enshrined in law, and the unemployment rate in the Black community was 40%. elderly people could walk safely in that community without fear of being assaulted by their grandchildren. We have the highest marriage rate of any group in society. It was our Christian faith and our commitment to family that shielded us from the horrors of Jim Crow. So how can you conclude if even during the depression, we didn’t rob, and steal, and kill each other the way we are today. So how can you make a claim that poverty is the root cause of some of this behavior we’re witnessing?
Patrice:
I think you’re 100% right. Now you brought up 1776. Please talk about that initiative and also the initiative you’re launching regarding moms who have lost their children to violence and are speaking out.
Bob:
1776 we’re celebrating our first-year anniversary on the 18th of February. That’s when a group of 23 scholars and activists got together and decided we were going to respond to… 1619, this was a project of the New York Times Magazine section, Nikole Hannah-Jones, and other Black journalists got together and wrote, wanted to redefine America’s birth date of 1619 when the first 20 African slaves arrived on our shore. They concluded in their essays that America is incurably racist, and capitalism was the outcome of the slavocracy. Therefore, America is to be forever condemned and defined by slavery. Therefore, all white people are complicit and should be punished, and all Black people victims to be compensated. So we decided that we would respond not with a counter-argument, but with a counter-inspirational and aspirational narrative. So we have essays that refute the fundamental premise of 1619, that slavery and the legacy of slavery is responsible for some of the pathology that we’re seeing today.
We have evidence that when White people were at their worst Blacks were at their best. In Chicago for example in 1929, there were 731 Black-owned businesses and $100 million dollars in real estate assets that blacks owned during segregation. This is true all over the country, there were small Wall Streets all over the country. When we were denied access to hotels, we built our own. The Waluhaje in Atlanta, the Carver and Calvert Hotels in Florida, in Miami. St. Charles in Chicago, St. Theresa in New York. I could go on and on and on. We built on medical schools, we even had our own railroad that operated from Baltimore in 1868. We had our own railroad when 1,000 blacks were fired. We collected our own capital and financed a railroad that successfully ran from Baltimore to Maine.
So, we have a rich history of entrepreneurship and resilience that is being kept from our young people. Instead, all of what the radical left is doing is preaching victimization. That it’s somehow that because of our racial pass that Blacks they exempt from any personal responsibility for their own uplift. That’s what we’re challenging.
Patrice:
I love that. I love you just talked about personal agency. The fact that we as individuals have children have the freedom and have the ability to make decisions for ourselves. It seems like those values in addition to the family, in addition to the community are values that you promote through the Woodson Center. But just returning to one other topic. I’ve been surprised I live right outside of DC, we’re seeing carjackings again. I haven’t seen that since the ’80s, I believe. Across so many cities we’re seeing this resurgence in violent crime and crime and violence overall. Talk to me why do you think we’re seeing such a resurgence in violence? And what can we do about it? What is your organization doing about it?
Bob:
I think that the upsurge in violence is directly related to the vilification of the police department. I think there is a direct correlation when the radical left has started its assault on policing and calling for defunding the police, the police as a consequence engaged in what I call nullification. They decide if they’re going to be accused of racism they won’t patrol those high crime areas as aggressively as they would have. That’s a consequence of Freddie Gray in Baltimore, 10 years ago. You’ve seen a decline in aggressive policing in those communities and the rise in murder rates. To the point now where recruitment of police officers around the country is down 62%. Many of them are retiring and they’re not being replaced. In some cities, it takes 30 minutes for the police to respond to a 911 call.
But the people who are advocating defund the police don’t have to live with the consequences of what they’re advocating because the crime isn’t happening where they live. What we’re doing at the Woodson Center, frankly, is we are working with a group of Black mothers, 2,500 of them who have lost children to violence. They are coming together and they want to give voice to say, “That we are against defunding the police.” They’re also working with the prosecutors and working with the homicide detectives when a murder occurs by actually serving as a liaison between the police department and the families. As a consequence, more trust is built and more cases are being closed.
Patrice:
That is an excellent example of community engagement with police and helping to restore trust. I think that you’ve seen a loss between police and communities. In part, because as you rightly said this anti-police rhetoric is been devastating. I’d love to wrap up our discussion today just asking, as we look forward, what are one or two policies that you would like to see implemented? Whether it’s at the federal level or for states to consider, that you think will really uplift poor communities and help those Americans who are still struggling to achieve that economic mobility and that American dream?
Bob:
I’m not so sure it’s another policy we need. We just need to look for remedies where the problem is. We need to stop the hustle right now. Because Black Lives Matter is raising millions of dollars to address systemic racism. That’s supposed to be the cause of the decline in these cities. The National Football League pledged $250 million to address “systemic racism.” I don’t know what that is. But I really think that private corporations should stop allowing themselves to be cheated by Black Lives Matter. We ought to be investing, not in esoteric training of middle-class Blacks, giving race grievance training to guilty white people. Instead, that money should be invested with these mothers and other community-based programs that are solving the problem. The leading cause of death of young Black men is other young Black men. There’s nothing that institutional racism can do to stop that. That is an internal problem that has to be addressed. The enemy is in the Black community and that’s where the solution has to be supported.
Patrice:
Sir, you have so well-articulated what I certainly believe. I’m a mom of three Black boys, including two babies. This is what I’m teaching them. I’m teaching them about personal responsibility, agency, about looking out for their own community. I think that we need more of the types of community-based programs that you are working on today. So thank you so much for your time, Mr. Woodson, and for sharing your thoughts with our listeners today. I’m just going to plug for a fascinating read, I recommend that listeners check out your recent co-authored op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. It’s entitled, How the Left Hijack Civil Rights. Sir, thank you for joining us, and listeners we thank you for listening in to the, She Thinks podcast today.