Last week, at age 89, Robert L. Woodson, Sr. died. Woodson was a veteran community activist who received a sharp rebuke from the head of the NAACP, when Woodson defended Justice Clarence Thomas’s criticisms of racial preferences. Calling Woodson an “Intellectual Prostitute” speaks volumes on why Woodson parted ways with traditional civil-rights leaders in the 1970s, writes Jason L. Riley in the WSJ.

When asked by the Washington Post whether minorities should receive racial preferences to redress past discrimination, “77 percent of black leaders said yes, while 77 percent of the black public said no.”

In 1993, the NAACP passed a resolution opposing school vouchers, even though polls at the time showed that more than 80% of black people who knew about school vouchers supported them.

The NAACP, working outside the black mainstream, opposed the confirmation of Clarence Thomas.

“Thomas emphasized personal responsibility and self-help … he demanded equality of opportunity rather than guaranteed equality of results,” Woodson wrote.

Woodson’s message resonated with grassroots blacks.

Polls consistently revealed that the majority of the black populace supported Justice Thomas’s nomination and that the lower the income level, the greater the support.” Justice Thomas’s “greatest antagonists were leaders of the civil rights establishment who viewed his positions as a threat to their agenda of race-based grievances.”

Woodson was not partisan or especially ideological. He never hesitated to criticize Republican approaches to helping poor blacks.  Chief among his criticisms was that some conservatives were more interested in diagnosing the causes of social inequality than in pragmatic ways to address it.

Telling people to finish school, take care of their children and obey the law is excellent advice.

But Woodson argued, more was needed.

Woodson wrote,

“These researchers take their notebooks into low-income communities and tally how many people are on drugs and in prison, how many young girls are pregnant, and how many youths have dropped out of school.”

“They do not look for models of success—families that, in spite of similar circumstances, have raised children who have refused the lures of drugs and gangs, who have stayed in school, who have not had babies out of wedlock.”

Facilitate Success

Woodson was always on the lookout for stronger direct engagement.

“Scholars on both the left and right make comfortable livings detailing the pathologies of the poor without ever talking with a single poor person,” he wrote.

After stints at the liberal National Urban League and the conservative American Enterprise Institute, he founded his own organization in 1981 to do the kind of work he believed would make a bigger difference in facilitating upward mobility. His legacy is the Woodson Center, whose mission is to seek out those “models of success” and replicate them.

Woodson worked comfortably along with the people he was trying to help, writes Mr. Riley.

(Woodson) believed that individual initiative, self-sufficiency and strong families were the most effective and enduring ways to address poverty. He believed the beneficiaries must play a key role in the restitution of their own communities.

Woodson wrote, “Solutions are usually found among those closest to those suffering the problem.”

Jason L. Riley writes, “We need more ‘community activists’ like Bob Woodson.

RIP, Bob Woodson.