Bob Woodson Was a Hero

T here’s a trend among some young Catholic women who, after struggling to find a decent, marriageable man, pray a novena prayer to Saint Joseph for a husband. It’s hard not to wonder if someone had prayed for another Saint Joseph sometime before April 1937, when conservative civil rights leader Robert L. Woodson Sr. was born. That would begin to explain Woodson’s role in American culture.

Woodson did, in fact, write a book about a biblical Joseph — the one of technicolor dreams, in the first half of Scripture. “Today, in communities throughout the nation, hundreds of ‘modern-day Josephs’ are at work, restoring spiritual health in their neighborhoods, guiding others to lives of value and fulfillment,” Woodson wrote in The Triumphs of Joseph: How Today’s Community Healers Are Reviving Our Streets and Neighborhoods, published in 2007. Woodson added:

Although Joseph was betrayed and treated unjustly he always held firmly to the belief that God could work through any situation, and even in the worst circumstances he continued to serve without resentment. He never yielded to bitterness and his attitude determined his availability to God. Likewise, our modern-day ‘Josephs’ have faced adversity and injustice without bitterness or resentment.

Woodson could diagnose what ailed American inner cities as well as, or better than, his peers. But it was his hope — rooted in supernatural virtue and practical experience — that set him apart among leaders in politics and civil society. Our Achilles’ heel has forever been ideology. Most figure that you must surrender to it, at least to some degree, in order to secure funding or to achieve office and to be among the sophisticated. Woodson didn’t care about any of that as much as he cared about enabling men to flourish rather than think of themselves as helpless and angry victims. He wrote:

If we are to tap the possibilities for moral and spiritual revitalization, we must move the focus of the policy debate beyond racial and economic considerations. For an answer to the crisis we now face we must go beyond the level of education, jobs, housing, or racial reconciliation. These strategies will never be able to address the root of a crisis that is essentially spiritual and moral. If we are to identify effective remedies, we must be willing to look to a new source for solutions.

He was talking about creativity in redemption. Dealing with reality and not an unrealistic ideal of what we think reality should be — which has been the downfall of many of us. And so, for Woodson, the leaders one should turn to weren’t “the experts” — such as Al Sharpton, to name one self-appointed spokesman for everything involving black men in America — but the many modern-day Josephs, some of whom had recently come out of prison:

They have experienced what it is to live in drug-infested, crime-ridden neighborhoods. Many have themselves fallen but have been able to recover through their faith in God. Their authority is attested to, not by their position and prestige in society, but by the thousands of lives they have been able to reach and change. . . . They embrace the worst cases and they work with meager resources, yet their effectiveness eclipses that of conventional professional remedies.

One of the examples Woodson pointed to in the book was a faith-based substance-abuse recovery program that cost only $50 per person per day yet has a “70 percent success rate, in stark contrast with conventional therapeutic programs for substance abusers that charge up to $600 a day per client and yet have only single-digit success rates.”

Woodson nonetheless critiqued some of the leaders of the civil rights movement. Earlier this spring, Woodson quoted an infamous essay by Jesse Jackson published in Ebony in 1978. Jackson had written: “Morally weak people not only inhibit their own personal growth, but finally contribute to the politics of decadence. . . . A generation of people lacking the moral and physical stamina necessary to fight a protracted civilizational crisis is dangerous to itself, its neighbors and to future generations.” Woodson wrote that “this was the true spirit of the civil-rights movement: moral uprising, not mere political maneuvering.” Jackson, at one time, had been a “moral reformer.” That was before politics took over. Woodson concluded: “At his best, Jackson confronted not only injustice from without, but the moral failures within our own communities. He spoke of responsibility and self-determination and challenged wounded people not to surrender to victimhood. Many of us respected him for that. I certainly did.”

Woodson died in his sleep at age 89. You might see some remembrances that describe him as a leader of the black conservative movement. You may see him painted as an alternative to the “real” civil rights movement. In truth, he took the early civil rights movement at its word and got practical. Thanks be to God for Robert Woodson. The eternal spark of the Divine was clear from the tender glimmer in his eye, with which he could see into the hearts of men and encourage them to see the truth and beauty of their lives. That hope is still worth keeping alive. Consider it both an act of faith and a challenge.

This column is based on one available through Andrews McMeel Universal’s Newspaper Enterprise Association.