YouTube video credit to the Bastiat Society of Washington, DC, recorded October 10, 2024, at the Leadership Institute, Arlington, VA.

Long-time conservative black leader Robert (Bob) Woodson, born in 1937 in Philadelphia, is still going strong at the age of 87. On October 10th this year, he spoke at an event hosted by AIER’s Bastiat Society of Washington, DC on the destructive DEI policies of the American Left and the need to counter it with a return to traditional American values, the principles of morality, and color-blind civil rights.

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During his talk, Mr. Woodson explained how he parted ways with the civil rights movement in the 1970s over the issue of forced busing for the purpose of racial desegregation. He believed that the progressive push to force desegregation was an implicit racist attitude that blacks were inferior to whites and, therefore, incapable of prospering on their own in their own segregated black communities. This did not mean that Mr. Woodson was opposed to blacks and whites living and working together, only that racial integration should be achieved organically through equal opportunity under the law, not through government force.

Mr. Woodson also explained how the highly aspirational goal of Martin Luther King, Jr. to achieve a color-blind society based on moral character was hijacked by self-serving race-grievance merchants after Dr. King’s assassination in 1968. He said that new government anti-poverty programs introduced in the 1960s and 1970s mostly benefited the government agencies and administrators of those programs and not the low-income communities they were intended to help. He described it as a “bait-and-switch” scheme, which is still very much in force today.

Mr. Woodson said he learned that only 20%-30% of the funding for anti-poverty government programs went to intended recipients with 70%-80% going to the government agencies and the administrators of those programs. It was from his realization of the bait-and-switch nature of anti-poverty programs that Mr. Woodson left the Democrat Party during the Carter administration in the late 1970s. He subsequently founded his own non-profit organization in 1981, The Woodson Center, to help low-income communities through self-help initiatives, such as restoring strong family values, economic education, market-based enterprise, and eliminating dependence on government.

He discussed the need for more “Josephs” in our communities, referencing Joseph in the Bible, i.e. those who have first-hand, grass-roots experience persevering through hardship and achieving success in their own disadvantaged communities or having achieved redemption after previous mistakes and failures. He explained that people with such real life experience are the best leaders to help disadvantaged communities and represent the type of leaders that his Woodson Center organization seeks to support. The basic idea behind his Woodson Center is that such grass-roots leaders are far superior in helping to transform disadvantaged individuals and communities than any government program.

He remarked that the principles of market economics should be applied to social economics. In other words, the principles of free market economics, which the progressive Left has always opposed, are essential to the restoration of America’s urban centers.

Mr. Woodson also mentioned the 1776 Unites project that he created in February 2020 to counter the radical 1619 Project developed by The New York Times in 2019. He founded 1776 Unites as an effort to speak for Americans of all races, creeds, and political convictions who oppose the efforts to demoralize and demonize the United States and its foundations from within and to turn its people against one another with false history and grievance politics.

Robert Woodson is the author of several books, including Lessons from the Least of These: The Woodson Principles (2020), Red, White, and Black: Rescuing American History from Revisionists and Race Hustlers (2021), and his latest book A Pathway to American Renewal: Red, White, and Black, published September 2024.

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