Quote of the Day: Robert Woodson (RIP)

“The victimizer might have knocked you down, but it is the victim that has to get up.”

Until recently, I had not heard of Robert L. Woodson, Sr., the civil rights activist who just passed at the age of 89—or if I had, the memory is lost to me. The WSJ had a piece by Jason Riley that started with this quote, and it immediately caught my attention.

Woodson was known as a community activist, a phrase that normally raises my hackles, but the quote caused me to read further. He was apparently somewhat of a maverick in the Civil Rights community, a realist who agreed with Clarence Thomas that blacks should seek equality of opportunity, not equality of results. The quote encapsulates this view beautifully by acknowledging that wrong was done, but that even the wronged have some responsibility for what happens next. You can accept a helping hand, but ultimately it is you who must stand.

In his work with the poor, he found that the majority of blacks agreed with this sentiment, but it was no longer the plank of the NAACP or other civil rights organizations. According to the WSJ piece, he was not particularly partisan but felt that scholars on both the right and the left were each guilty of their own form of myopia.

“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,” Woodson wrote. “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.”

He founded the Woodson Center, whose mission is to find models of success and replicate them. I don't know how successful he was, but it is an interesting point of view that you don't hear very often.