LARRY P. ARNN: Bob Woodson
is both brave and sensible. He's been a leader in
the civil rights movement since he was hardly more than
a boy, in the early 1960s. That was not always a safe
thing to do back then. He is tough and
principled and kind. He has a master's
degree in social work from the University of
Pennsylvania, an Ivy League institution. In the '60s, he joined
the civil rights movement. From '71 to '73, he
headed a major project at the National Urban
League on Criminal Justice in New York City. In 1974, he became
a resident fellow at the American Enterprise
Institute, in Washington. By this time he'd been
doing a lot of thinking. And he began to build a
movement, of which he's now the godfather. He's the inventor of
the most promising thing in race relations
in America today, but more than race relations-- in assistance to
people who've got tough lives and haven't had a chance. He calls it the neighborhood
empowerment movement. And he brought this work
a common-sense observation that's too much forgotten. Troubled areas can be improved
by the same principles that work everywhere. And they can really
only be improved by the people who live in them. So he began to look for
people who are like that. We've just been reminiscing. It's a miracle we're actually
getting around to this lecture, because he and I could
sit and talk all day. But we were remembering
a particular one of them that I knew very well. There was a man
named Leon Watkins, and he lived in Watts, which
is the place where the riots started in '68 and later in LA. And he made the newspapers--
and I read the article-- because he put up wanted posters
all over Watts with a picture of the head of the Crips-- a gang-- the Bloods were the
other big gang back then-- and his name on it. Wanted. He put his address on there. And so the day came when
the head of the Crips drove up to his place with an
entourage, carrying weapons. And he said, what
do you want with me? And Leon says, it's not I
who wants you, it's Jesus. [LAUGHS] I heard that story. I just love that story. And so I went down and met him-- got to know him. But I went down and met
him through Bob Woodson. And he has helped build-- Bob's just telling me-- Bob Woodson's enterprise that
reaches all over the country now. And it focuses on
people who are heroes, and who are trying to
build a decent life on the old principles
of what decency is. And those principles are not
black and they're not white. They are what they are. They're human. And I want you to
know, I've always found him an inspiring man. There's a fire
that burns in Bob. It warms everything he
comes in contact with, for all the time I've known him. But it doesn't burn him
up, because the fire is sparked by love. And he maintains
that all the time. Robert Woodson. [APPLAUSE] ROBERT WOODSON: Thank you. I have to say that this is
the first time in my life that I've ever been
introduced by someone who nearly brought me to tears. Larry reminded me of how
we met and when we met and the precious
person of Leon Watkins. There is a prayer that I
utter each time that I speak, and I commend to you. And that is, God,
give me the strength to tell and pursue the
truth, especially when it's inconvenient to me. That if you want to go
someplace that you haven't been, you have to be willing to do
something you haven't done. Or to put it another way, if
you keep doing what you do, you keep getting what
you got, to quote one of my grassroots leaders. George Bernard Shaw asked
a rhetorical question, "Must a Christ die in
every age to save those that lack imagination?" And Einstein said
that, "Imagination is more important than knowledge." Ladies and gentlemen,
at no other time do we need moral imagination
in the defense of this country. As Larry said, I came as a
veteran of the civil rights movement. But I must tell you a
little bit about my journey. I don't define myself
as a conservative. I define my political philosophy
as radical pragmatism. And I am a cardiac
Christian, because Christ burns in my heart. And so therefore that defines. And so what I do, then,
is look for allies that fits into my
mission-- and that is to serve the least
of God's children. My life is dedicated to serving
the least of God's children. The quality of any
person's life, or a nation is determined by,
how does it affect the least of God's children? So when I'm looking
for political allies, I look for people whose
strategic interests are compatible with
the strategic interests of the least of God's children. And as a civil rights leader
at the time serving in West Chester, Pennsylvania--
the home of Bayard Rustin, who was a principal
advisor to King-- and they would come through
our town to bring the person. And we would push
our local issues. And I became disenchanted with
the civil rights movement, as a young worker,
over two issues. The first one was forced
busing for integration. I believed that the
opposite of segregation was desegregation,
that integration was an individual matter. Because I believed
then, as I believe now, that if you say the
goal is integration, then you are concluding that
anything that's all Black is all bad. And so that got me in
trouble with some people. Because they said,
well, Bob, your position is compatible with the John
Birch Society and the Klan. And my response-- well,
if I like classical music and Hitler does, am I supposed
to not like classical music? [LAUGHTER] You should take
your position based on what's right and compatible
with what you believe, not who agrees or disagrees
with your position. The second reason that I left
the civil rights movement is when we were leading
demonstrations outside of Wyatt Laboratory-- a
pharmaceutical company-- and after two months,
when they desegregated and they hired nine
Black PhD chemists, we asked these brothers and
sisters to join our movement. They said, we got these jobs
because we were qualified, not because of the sacrifices
of you all out there picketing. And then I realized that we
have more of a class problem than we do a race problem. And so I realized that many of
the people who sacrificed most in the struggle for
civil rights did not benefit from the change. Because as Dr. King
said, what good does it do to have
the right to live in a neighborhood of your
choosing or eat in a restaurant if you don't have the
means to exercise or take advantage of that right? So it is not just
opening the doors. We must invest in
people's capacity to take advantage of what
opportunity is created. And I believe then
that there was a big split in the civil
rights movement at that time, because-- well, the poverty programs
that came along at the time, instead of being a continued
restoration force, the way the civil rights
laws were built, the poverty program
proves to be a virus that was more injurious to the
welfare of the Black community in this nation
than anything that happened between the end of
slavery up until that point. And that's a dramatic point. And I want to unpack
that for a while, because I think it is important. Because this nation
is in crisis right now, where everything
is being divided. And as I said, my
political philosophy is radical pragmatism
that I am in favor. And so I ask myself, what
are the policies that favor the thing? Now, the left--
the radical left-- has convinced people that the
problems facing Black America today-- 70% out-of-wedlock birth, the
high crime rates, unemployment, all the other deficiencies-- are as a result of the legacy
of slavery and discrimination that followed. And so therefore it culminated
in the 1619 essays in 2019 by The New York Times, headed
by Nikole Hannah-Jones, that clarified all of that and
said, America's real birth date is 1619, not 1776. And therefore America
is incurably racist-- that racism is in its DNA
and that white people should be shamed, blamed, and
punished, and Black people should be patronized and paid. [LAUGHS] And therefore because some of
the Founders were slave owners, and therefore
America's capitalism is built on a slavetocracy. And so this is what
is pervasive today. And so what we decided
at the Woodson Center, because the radical left is
using the legacy of slavery-- I would say, the perversion
of that history-- as the principal bludgeon
to destroy the country-- since they were
using that messenger, we felt that the messenger
should also look like that. So we brought together
26 scholars and activists to defend 1776 as the real
birth date of the country. And so what we were offering--
and not as a counter debate-- we wanted to offer a
counter narrative that was both inspirational
and aspirational, and therefore to teach the
real truth of this country-- that, yes, America,
none of us should be defined by our birth
defects of slavery. How many of you want to be
defined by the worst things you've ever done as a child? None of you do. Because America is
about second chances. America is a country built on
the foundation of redemption. And so what we
offered, therefore, was in this counternarrative,
we went back to unpack that history. And so in our essays, we
demonstrate that Black America should not be defined
by slavery alone, but we should be defined
by the resilience and self-determination that
was in evidence in response to those oppressive conditions-- that most people don't know,
Black or white, the history of our response to oppression. One of our essayists
went back and looked at the records of
six plantations to see, what was the state of
the Black family in slavery. He found that 75% of every
one of those slave families had a man and a woman
raising children. There was a rush to marry
legally right afterwards. Well, there was a 75% illiteracy
rate among the slaves. That rate went down to
25% in less than 40 years, when the Freedmen's Bureau sent
agents south to teach Blacks. They said that the sabbath
schools, or the church schools, were doing more than anything
the government can do. Never in the
history of the world did a people reduce its
illiteracy rate from 75% to 25% in 40 years-- because of the self-help
efforts undertaken by these freed slaves. And it's because they had
these institutions that stand between the
government and the people, that we call
mediating structures. When Blacks were denied
access to hotels, what we did was build our own. We didn't have
insurance companies, so our churches
had burial society. We tapped those funds
to build hotels. We had the Waluhaje
Hotel in Atlanta, the Calvert Hotel in Miami,
the St. Theresa in Chicago. We built that. When we were denied access
to colleges and universities, we built 100 by the year 2025. Education gap--
Booker T. Washington partnered with Sears. And as a consequence-- Julius Rosenwald was
the CEO of Sears. He partnered with
Booker T. Washington. And he was going to manufacturer
schools in his plant. Booker T. Washington says
that we don't want charity, we want an investment. So he put up $4 million. And the Black local
groups raised $4.8 million in response. And together they built
5,000 Rosenwald schools throughout the
South that operated. And as a consequence of
building these schools, in 1920, the education gap
between Blacks and whites in the South was three years. It was eight years for
whites, five years for Blacks. Because of the Rosenwald
school, the education gap, in less than 20 years,
closed within six months-- when we were crowded
classrooms, used textbooks, half the
budgets of white schools. The question is, if we
could close the education gap in the midst of
segregation, why can't we close the education
gap today, when many of those school systems are
being run by people of color? The whole issue of marriage-- we know that what helped
Blacks sustain themselves in the face of slavery
and discrimination was their two-parent households,
their Christian faith, and their commitment
to self-determination. Again, let's look
at the records. Let's look at facts. Because if we cannot make
decisions based upon fact-based truths, then lies become normal. The fact is that in 1930 and
1940, when racism was enshrined in the law, there was no
political representation in government, the
Black community had the highest marriage rate
of any other group in society. Elderly people,
as a consequence, could walk safely
in their communities without fear of being assaulted
by their grandchildren. The poverty rate in
the Black community, according to Thomas
Sowell, in 1940 was 85%. And in 10 years,
it was reduced-- by 20%. And then by 1960, it
was reduced another 15%. Up until 1965,
two-parent households and the incarceration rate
from the turn of the century was just 20% to 25%. And so in 1868, when 1,000
Blacks were fired off the docks of
Baltimore, Maryland, they didn't march on Washington
demanding jobs, peace, and freedom. They went to the
burial societies. And Blacks owned
their own railroad-- the Chesapeake Marine Dry
Dock and Railroad Company, that hired 1,000 people,
including white workers-- and successfully ran a railroad
from Baltimore to Maine. In the city of Chicago that
you hear, in the Brownsville Section, you talk about
redlining that took place. In 1929, Blacks owned 731
businesses and $100 million in real-estate assets in what
we called the Black Wall Street. This was true in
most urban centers. Remember, just a few
decades away from slavery, there were 20
Blacks who were born slaves who died millionaires. What sustained Blacks
was not becoming bitter about their
circumstance, but working. There is an example,
for instance, about what I call
radical grace, that's at the heart of the
Black community. There was a man
named Robert Smalls. He was born in Sumter,
South Carolina. He was born a slave. He was working on a supply ship. And when his master went to
have dinner on a Friday night, he stole away with six
of his crew members, picked up the families, and put
on his master's hat and coat and went past five
Southern garrisons and turned the ship
over to the Union Navy. He was celebrated
throughout the North. And as a consequence
of his brave actions, Lincoln permitted Blacks
to fight in the Civil War. Well, after the war, he
became a wealthy businessman. And under
Reconstruction, he served in the House of Representatives
and became wealthy and went back and
purchased the plantation on which he was a slave. And because the slave
master's wife and children were destitute, and
she was delusional, he took them in
and cared for them and permitted her to sleep
in the master bedroom, because she didn't
realize slavery had ended. Robert Small is an example
of radical grace in action. And so this is a history that
is being kept from this country. And there are endless examples. There were 20
Blacks who were born slaves who died millionaire. One last story, and I
want to talk about how we apply all this knowledge today. Betty Mason was born 1818-- illiterate, Mississippi, walked
behind a wagon of her master, going from Mississippi
to Salt Lake City. He was a Mormon. She had three children. She tended the sheep. One of them was by
the slave master. When she got there-- it took six
months walking behind a wagon. They moved to California. It was a free state. She was freed. She was a midwife. She made $1.50 a day. She saved her
money for 10 years, purchased land in what is
now downtown Los Angeles and made a commercial--
and when she died, she died a millionaire
and ended up being a philanthropist
and founder of the AME Church there. There are endless examples of
only in this system of ours could somebody be born a slave
and die millionaires and live this kind of life. And so the question
is, if people could do what they did when
whites were at their worst, Blacks were at their best. But there are people who
want to conceal these truths and define Black America by
the birth defect of this nation rather than by its promise. The conservative movement
has proprietary interests that is compatible with
this self-determination. The attitude that exists
then exists today. Larry talked about Leon Watkins. Leon was a Robert Smalls. He demonstrates that when
you have self-determination, a will to fight, and
belief in your God, that there's no barrier
that can hold you back. But what we must do,
ladies and gentlemen, is that we must apply old
values to a new vision-- that the spirit of
renewal, that we've got to take the principles that
operate on our market economy and apply them to
the social economy. In our market economy,
only 3% of the people are entrepreneurs, but they
generate 70% of the jobs. Entrepreneurs tend to be C
students, not A students. Those A students come back
to universities like this, and they teach. C students come back and endow. [LAUGHTER] Because smart people
have to have all the answers before they act. And when they act, the
opportunity is gone. But C students, like me,
we can fail, get back up, try again, fail the second
time, and then the third time we get it. That's the level of
self-determination and grit, like Leon Watkins did. And so, ladies and
gentlemen, my message today is that if we are to retake
this country from those who would use race
to defame us, we must not do so by
having white papers and arguing on Fox against
what the other side is doing. We need a ground strategy-- a ground strategy like
George Whitfield, who was-- went to Pembroke,
1732, in England. His father was an innkeeper. He died. And so George had to clean
the inn where they lived. He didn't have enough
money to go to college, and a friend supported him. But he had to do sort
of a work, and he served the Wesley brothers. And at that time,
students at Oxford could not speak to students
who were upper class. But they established
a friendship. He went on to become
a famous preacher. And also, when he
came to the colonies, he did more to unite the
colonies than almost anybody. But what George did
was he got on horseback and rode to every single colony,
spreading the word of God. He must have spoken directly
to 70% of all of the people in our colonies,
which united us. Ladies and gentlemen,
those of us who are servants of God, who
wish to make a difference, we've got to leave
our hallowed halls and go out, as
George Whitfield did, and interact
directly with people who are suffering a problem. But we also must identify people
who exemplify the virtues. What the left is doing
now is a parasite on the civil rights legacy. They are talking about
justice for George Floyd and hijacking the
civil rights movement. And then they go to Portland and
burn the Bibles, burn the flag, and then talk against
the nuclear family. These are the most destructive. And so we believe that in
order for us to stand up, we must de-racialize race
and de-segregate poverty. But we're not going to
do this by, as I said, issuing white papers,
or complaining about what the left is doing. We have to join in
partnership with people who I call the Josephs of this world. The Woodson Center, when
we were looking for a model about how can people with
wealth and people who are poor come together to
form a coalition to take back this nation,
I found it in Genesis, in the story of Joseph. Joseph, as you know, was from
a dysfunctional Hebrew family. [LAUGHTER] And he was a little
arrogant, too. And he told his brothers, I
saw you bowing down to me. But that's not the way to endear
yourself with your siblings. [LAUGHTER] And of course, you
know the story, how they faked his death,
killed an animal, sold them to the Ishmaelites, who
were slave traders in Egypt. And he's found himself
in a house of Potiphar. But he never became bitter
and became the best servant in the house of Potiphar. And he was a very
handsome young man. And Potiphar's
wife lusted for him and wanted to have sex with him. But he refused, because
he had lateral integrity and horizontal integrity. It would have been a violation
of the trust his master had and also a sin against his God. And she sent all
the servants out and said that he tried to
rape her when he ran out. And he was put in prison, where
he became the best prisoner. And he rose in the prison. And he met the cup
bearer and the baker-- interpreted their dreams. And they said they
would help him, and they turned
their backs on him. One day the pharaoh
had a dream that none of his MBAs or his
PhDs could answer. And then the cup
bearer said, there is a Hebrew in the prisons
that has the ability to interpret dreams. So Joseph was cleaned up and
brought before us-- and said, bow down to the god pharaoh. He refused, because it would
be a sin against his God. So pharaoh knew
he had integrity. And when pharaoh said
to him, I understand you can interpret
dreams, he said, no, the last time I did that,
I got in a little trouble. But he said, God
interprets dreams. I am merely the
instrument of God's will. And he said, there will
be seven years of plenty, followed by seven
years of famine. Save up 20% and
appoint an overseer. The first time that
we had flat tax. [LAUGHTER] And of course, you
know what happened. He appointed Joseph. Think about how
powerful that is. First of all, the
fact that Joseph was treated unjustly
and imprisoned but never became bitter. And Joseph, as a consequence
of his position of power, was able to save not only
the brothers who betrayed him but the Egyptians
who enslaved him. And so he is a powerful model. So we use that as a model
to looking for solutions. And that's what I want to
talk about-- what solutions. We go into the inner
cities, and we look for the two types of Josephs. We're looking for people who are
in poverty, but not of poverty. You say 70% of the people are
raising children or dropping out of school. It means 30% are not. We go into there. We look for people who are
raised-- the Josephs in Bible. They're in poverty,
not of poverty. They're raising children. They're not dropping
out of school, in jail. No one does research,
Larry, or documents why they're able to
achieve against the odds. But we do. They're the Leon
Watkins of this world. And then there's the
other type of Joseph, that were prostitutes,
that were gang-bangers, but through God's grace
they had become redeemed. And therefore, they
are powerful witnesses to others in that
environment that redemption is available to you if you
just follow this course. Leon Watkins is an example-- four children, living in
this gang neighborhood. He had to put his family in
the bathroom when the gangs-- he reached out to 26 members
of the east side Crips. And when they pulled
up, he walked up to him and he said, what do you want? He said, I'm going to talk
to you about your life. After sitting on a trash
can for three hours, he had Quake, who's still
around, in Bible study. Four days later, he
had all 26 members of the gang in Bible study. They went from being
predators to protectors of that community. And one day, Leon got a
call at 2:00 in the morning. They said, hey, we found
two people burglarizing our pharmacy. What should we do with them? So Leon said, what do
you think you should do? And he said, we should do them. He says, no, you're
peacekeepers now. Call the police. So there's a picture
on the front page of the LA Times of these
gang members with Leon turning over these burglars. And so they became
a force for good. There's an example
of what Josephs can do around this country. We did the same thing
in Washington, DC. 22 years ago, there was an
area called Benning Terrace. There were 53 murders in
a five-square-block area in two years. I recruited the Leon
Watkins, or the Josephs, that had the trust and
confidence of the people. And a 12-year-old
boy was killed. And so I sent them
into that neighborhood, to bring the warring factions
to my office downtown. They came in separate buses. They had bulletproof vests on. We gave them a
meal-- because kids will fight when they're
drinking together, but not when they're
eating together. And they said, no one ever
asked us to be peaceful. Well, through a series of
meetings, they shook hands. And they went back
into that community that they used to terrorize,
now as ambassadors of peace. Because once their
character changes, their characteristic
has an advantage. And so I say 80% of
my closest friends have letters in front of
their names, not behind them. But if we can just unite the
pharaohs and the Josephs, they are the ones in
these communities-- 82% of Black surveys are
against defunding the police. 60% of Black surveys
do not believe racial discrimination is the
principal barrier to their-- but they are not given a voice. They are the Josephs out there. And there are people falsely
claiming to represent them. And as a consequence, their
actions are being perverted. So what we are doing, we
started something called 1776. We are going around
the gatekeepers and giving voice
to the voiceless. And this is what's
going to unite America. Low-income Blacks are
America's new patriots, because they are
the ones suffering the most from the
vilification of police. We brought together a group
called Voices of Black Mothers United-- 2,500 of them, who've lost
children to urban violence. And they are the ones who took
out a full-page ad that says, we are not for
defunding the police. It's important,
ladies and gentlemen, for America to move
race, because America is in a moral and
spiritual free fall, that is consuming young people
across race and class. The leading cause of death of
young people in the inner city is homicide. The leading cause of
death in Appalachia, among lower-income whites,
is prescription drugs. And the leading cause of death
in Silicon Valley is suicide. The suicide rate among
teens in Silicon Valley is six times the
national average, where there are
two-parent households with master's degrees, with
a median income of $180,000. So it isn't just
family composition. So what our plan is, to bring
together people across race and class lines-- the
mothers of Appalachia, Silicon Valley mothers,
and inner-city mothers-- to come together
to find out, how can we exchange strategies to
promote healing and overcoming? And what lessons can we teach
those to prevent children from-- but we won't do that, as long as
we are being separated by race. And so those are the
kinds of coalitions that we are seeking to do. And we need the pharaohs and
the Josephs to come together. And that's why what we need-- Larry, there needs
to be a university. As conservatives, we
spend too much time doing failure studies. That's why we have the
reputation of not caring about poor and Black folks. You can learn nothing
from studying failure except how to create failure. And so what we are
recommending is that scholars go into
low-income communities and report on resilience. There's an example. There's a mother--
for three years, she has two daughters sleeping
in the back of her car and sleeping in
homeless shelters. The girls were studying by
the light on the cell phone. One graduated salutatorian. The other graduated
valedictorian. They started Spelman
College as sophomore because they took so many
advanced-placement classes. Why don't we know who they are? There was an 18-year-old Black
homeless boy who borrowed his brother's bike, and for six
hours bicycled across the state of Georgia, in August-- only to pitch a tent on the
grounds of a community college that he attended
the year before. And two white police officers
came over and asked him what he was doing. And once he found out,
they put him up in a motel. And they wanted to
get him a job and get the owner of a restaurant
to give him some money. He said, I don't want money. I want a job. So he started washing dishes. Well, someone posted
his experience. They raised $80,000.
in three days. He held a press conference
to thank everybody. The president of the college
allowed him to move on campus. And now he's using that
money to support himself. There are endless
examples of grace in action in our society, where
people are coming together to help one another-- that deep in the
DNA of this country is that desire to reward
the virtues of our Founders. When a homeless man in Boston
found $40,000 in a knapsack-- and he turned it in. And this was posted-- $96,000 in three days. There are endless examples,
ladies and gentlemen, but we don't have anybody
on our side focusing on the promotion of health. Again, let me conclude by
saying, the answers exist. But we have got to join with
the Josephs of this world. But what's preventing us from
doing so is classism, elitism. There are a lot of people,
both left and right of center, who believe that
untutored means unwise-- and therefore they have
little to contribute. In our market economy, we don't
care whether Bill Gates ever went to college. We just care about
what he produces. In our social economy, if you
got the right credentials, you can waste a million
dollars, if it's well-intended, by well-credentialed people. And so we need to apply some
of the principles in the market economy. As I've said, the market
economy, we reward outcomes. In our social economy,
we reward credentials. There was a man, who was
one of my favorites-- he died not too long ago-- A.G. Gaston. He was Alabama's first
Black millionaire. He had a sixth-grade education. And A.G. Gaston said, it's
better to say "I is rich" than "I am poor." [LAUGHTER] And that is a metaphor
for everything that I'm trying to tell you-- that don't get turned off
if someone speak to you and they dangle a
participle or break a verb. Listen to them anyway, because
sometimes the Josephs can bring us the wisest solutions,
even though it may come in an unvarnished package. God speaks to people
in different ways. But, ladies and
gentlemen, this nation can only be saved when the
good pharaohs and the Josephs come together, and we determine
what government will do. It won't come the other way. But in order for us to develop
that level of cooperation, we must lower our pretenses,
shed the limits that we have and what we believe
in other people. I just want to close with
a quote from Samuel Adams. And he wrote February 12, 1779. He said, "A general dissolution
of principles and manners will more surely overthrow
the liberties of America than the whole force
of a common enemy. While the people are virtuous,
they cannot be subdued. But when they lose
their virtue, they will be ready to
surrender their liberties to the first external
or internal invader. If virtue and knowledge are
diffused among the people, they will never be
enslaved, and this will be their great security. Neither the wisest Constitution
nor the wisest laws will secure the
liberty and happiness of a people whose manners
are universally corrupt." We can't just say, we need
lower taxes, limited government. If you want limited government,
then support the institutions that the people use
that prevents them from needing government. And expectations
should be followed with the means of providing the
means to meet the expectation. And so we as conservatives
have to understand that we must leave
our comfortable places and go out, as Larry has
done, learn to identify, respect, support, and learn from
and serve the least of these. God bless you. [APPLAUSE]
