By Eric Metaxas and Anne Morse, announcing the winner of the 2018 Wilberforce award, Robert Woodson (pictured above), April 30, 2018 at: http://www.breakpoint.org
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Recently, Robert Woodson (1937- ), an African-American sociologist, visited the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington DC. A display there, he later wrote, “stopped me in my tracks.”
The 1980s were, according to the exhibit, “years of paradox.” While many blacks pursued advanced degrees and entered the professions, others existed in poor neighborhoods filled with drugs and violence. Who or what was to blame?
The museum’s answer: Ronald Reagan, a president who cut many social programs.
Woodson doesn’t buy it. “Is it truly institutional racism and heartless policies that have resulted in conditions today?” he asks.
“If the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow laws are responsible for the decline in marriage and the rise in poverty and out-of-wedlock births in the black community,” he writes, “then why, during the Great Depression, did blacks have the highest marriage rate?”
And why, during the decades when blacks “had little political power and faced legalized discrimination, did they still make significant economic progress?”
Prior to the 1960s, Woodson writes, African Americans “tapped their internal capacity . . . Hard work, cooperation, academic performance and moral excellence were elements of a strategy to achieve.”
He points to the history of black churches and civic institutions as models of what African Americans could achieve. When denied access to banks, they built their own. When insurance companies turned them away, black churches created “burial societies” and mutual-aid societies to assist the poor.
Tragically, Woodson says, that “rich history of self-determination” was “abandoned” in the 1960s. What black America needs today, he concludes, is “a return to a culture based on self-determination, personal responsibility, and strong moral values.”
Which is why Woodson founded the Center for Neighborhood Enterprise (now known as the Woodson Center), to help the poor become self-sufficient. This is best achieved, Woodson believes, by placing control of community development, not in the hands of faraway bureaucrats, but in the hands of community leaders.
Woodson Center programs have spread all over the country, including the Violence-Free Zone, which sends young adult advisors into schools to mentor youth. When VFZ volunteers began work at one Richmond, Virginia, high school, arrests of students dropped 38 percent.
In Dallas, Woodson would report at a congressional hearing, one high school recorded 133 gang incidents before bringing in VFZ and zero the following year. Woodson Center programs have also transformed the lives of former drug addicts, prostitutes, and the homeless.
Why does Woodson succeed where so many others have failed? His answer is simple but sturdy: “Faith in God transforms the inside and that faith transforms the outside.”
For his tremendous work helping the poor and downtrodden, the Colson Center is awarding Robert Woodson the 2018 William Wilberforce Award, which recognizes those who exemplify the qualities of the British abolitionist and statesman, William Wilberforce. Wilberforce, more than any other single person, brought an end to the British slave trade and the reformation of morals in British society.
SEE ALSO:
http://www.blackpast.org/aah/woodson-sr-robert-l-1937
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Paul tells us to each “carry our own load” (Galatians 6:5). In the same paragraph, Paul also tells us to “bear one another’s burdens” (Galatians 6:2). Robert Woodson’s life work has been to ‘bear the burdens of others,’ serving them by helping them learn to be independent and ‘carry their own load.’
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Galatians 6:2-5 — Bear one another’s burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ. For if those who are nothing think they are something, they deceive themselves. All must test their own work; then that work, rather than their neighbor’s work, will become a cause for pride. For all must carry their own loads.
Romans 12:2 — Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will.
Proverbs 29:7 — The righteous care about justice for the poor, but the wicked have no such concern.
Galatians 5:13 — You were called to be free. But do not use your freedom to indulge the flesh; rather, serve one another humbly in love.
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You are never tired, O Lord, of doing us good; let us never be weary of doing you service. But as you have pleasure in the well-being of your servants, let us take pleasure in the service of our Lord, and abound in your work and in your love and praise evermore. Amen.
–John Wesley
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