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While elitists criticize and theorize about the poor, Robert L. Woodson Sr. looked for successes.
“The victimizer might have knocked you down, but it is the victim that has to get up.”
That’s a quote from Robert L. Woodson Sr., the veteran community activist who died last week at 89. On the political right, “community activism” is often viewed with suspicion or disdain, associated with progressive liberals who sow racial division, express contempt for the rights of others, and have an abiding faith in government solutions for problems that hamstring the black underclass. Woodson’s style of self-help advocacy cautions against painting with too broad a brush.
I met Woodson in 1994, when I attended a conference in Atlanta sponsored by the National Association of Black Journalists. I was just out of college and working at my hometown paper in Buffalo, N.Y. Though we’d never been introduced, I knew of him through his newspaper columns, which I read in the Conservative Chronicle, a weekly publication that reprinted the work of right-leaning newspaper columnists.
In remarks at the conference, Woodson defended Justice Clarence Thomas’s criticisms of racial preferences. This brought a sharp rebuke from the head of the NAACP, who called Woodson an “intellectual prostitute.” Woodson was probably more insulted by being called an intellectual, but the episode speaks volumes about why he parted ways with traditional civil-rights leaders in the 1970s.
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Jason L. Riley is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a columnist at The Wall Street Journal, and a Fox News commentator. Follow him on Twitter here.