ROBERT WOODSON: I'm
Bob Woodson, president of The Woodson Center. I'm here to talk about
race and economics. These two issues
in America did not converge until the 1960s with
some pretty devastating effects that I'll discuss in my remarks. But the character of any
nation or any individual is determined by how we
treat the least of us. In America, the
moral barometer is how we've treated Blacks in
America, and also low income people. Just a little history of that. Prior to the 1960s,
the responsibility for caring for those
who are in need and various ethnic
groups and racial groups was the responsibility
of private institutions within those groups. Immigrants coming
from the backwaters of Eastern and Southern
Europe, they came here. The first requirement was
to become acculturated, and also they must
be assimilated. And assimilation meant they
had to learn the language and learn the customs
and acculturation. They had to learn the customs
of the country as well. Well, the large cities
proved to be a melting pot and a place of
assimilation took place. And the civic institutions
within these communities, these cities, did a great job
of producing Americans out of these immigrants. In the Black community,
the same process emerged that even under
segregation and discrimination, there was a rich array of
civic institutions, churches, Masonic organizations that
rose up within the groups to provide for those in need. One of the largest
was in Philadelphia during Free Blacks in
1789, Mother Bethel Church. But even among free Blacks
who sought assistance from their church, there were
high moral standards for people who qualified for aid. You couldn't get assistance if
your poverty or your situation was caused by your own
slothfulness or immorality. So high standards were always
required for those receiving aid. And this continued
up until the 1930s with the crash of
the stock market. Pressure mounted on
these institutions, so they could not continue
to provide for their people. And so government intervened for
the first time in the economy on behalf of low income people
and people who were struggling, but intervention was largely
government to individuals. And so as a result, these
civic institutions pretty much stayed intact until the 1960s. This all changed. For the Black community up until
1965, 85% of all households had a man and a woman
raising children. But a lot of that changed in
the '60s after the Voting Rights Act passed and we had
the Watts Riots occurred. And Lyndon Johnson announced
his war on poverty. As a result of these events,
liberal social scientists at Columbia University School of
Social Work, Cloward and Piven, came up with a
social construct that says that the Black community-- if we want to really
emphasize the contradictions of capitalism, that
one of the ways that we can do that is to
insist that welfare to Blacks be given as reparations. And at the time
public aid to Blacks was really stigmatized
in the Black community. To overcome that stigmatization
the social scientists at the time began to
promote the notion that the nuclear
family was eurocentric and therefore racist. They concluded that if we
can separate work from income and replace it with
welfare, it would make fathers redundant in homes. Well, this social construct was
supported by the Black Power movement that saw the nuclear
family, too, as eurocentric. Also, welfare policies
were destigmatized. It was considered reparations. But just having a social
policy alone was not enough. The federal government,
through the opportunity offices and the poverty
programs, actually opened government offices and
actively recruited Blacks into the welfare system. Privacy laws, suits were filed
so that women who were pregnant out of wedlock no longer
had to declare paternity as a condition of
them getting welfare. And so it's the
combination of these events that you saw the
explosion of welfare. People, millions began to
flow into the welfare system. The liberal social
scientists concluded that if we could only
bankrupt our cities, then the federal
government would be compelled to change how
we address poverty by having income redistribution. So it was really socialist
aims at the time. And the Black
community was the agent through which they would
promote this dramatic change. And as a consequence,
millions of Blacks flowed into the welfare
system at a time in New York when the unemployment rate
for Black men was under 4%. And so what was predicted
actually came true. There was an explosion
of out of wedlock births, and so that number
of Black Americans, Black family
formation rates went from 85% out of
wedlock births to 70%, and all the accompanying
social pathology followed-- dropout rates, violence,
disintegration of families. All of these pathologies
occurred at one time in the Black community. And in '73, New York
City did, in fact, go bankrupt because of
the explosion of welfare. And this decline
was used by the left to justify racial antagonism. They said now that these
changes that are occurring were a direct result of
racial discrimination. 1619 came along
in August of 2019. This was really the fulfillment
of the policies that started in the '60s, that the
1619 Project from The New York Times began to look at
the problems facing Black America today, the
out of wedlock births, the explosion of
Black on Black crime. More Blacks were killed in
one year by other Blacks than were killed in 40 years
lynchings in the South. In other words, Black
American neighborhoods had a 9/11 every six months. And so the architects of
1619 associated those changes with a legacy of slavery
and discrimination. And they said because the
real birthday of America is 1619, that that was the
date that in Jamestown, 20 African slaves arrived, and so
America should be defined not from 1776, but 1619, that the
arrival of slave in America is incurably racist, and all
white people are villains and therefore to be punished. And all Blacks are
victims to be compensated. And that became the
dominant narrative that replaced the civil rights
proposition that we should be judged by the
content of our character and not the color of our skin. But that has now been replaced
with intersectionality, and race grievance is
the primary definition of what social activists
are engaged in today. And so what we at
the Woodson Center are doing with our 1776
campaign, what we're doing with the 1776 campaign is
we're challenging this notion that America should be defined
by its birth defect of slavery, but America should be
defined by its promise of equal opportunity. And what we are doing
by assembling scholars and activists is not
enough to challenge the intellectual
framework of 1619 because we believe that
experience will always triumph over an argument. Therefore, what
we have recruited are not only Black scholars
that are presenting essays to repudiate the
statements in 1619. But also, we bring
along activists whose lives are the embodiment
of the founding principles of personal responsibility. And so to challenge this
notion, we have given evidence. For instance, in 1920 to
1940, the education gap in the South between
Blacks and whites was eighth grade for whites,
it was fifth grade for Blacks. But because Julius Rosenwald,
the Jewish CEO of Sears, partnered with
Booker T. Washington, and Rosenwald put up $4
million, and the Black community raised $4.8 million. And together this partnership,
the Black community built 5,000 Rosenwald
schools in the deep South to provide education to
untutored and uneducated Blacks. And as a consequence of this
effort, between 1920 and 1940, just 20 years, the
education gap in the South closed from three
years to six months. When Blacks were denied
access to hotels, they built their own hotels. In every major city,
there was a major hotel. In Chicago, Illinois,
for instance, in 1929, in the
Bronzeville section, Blacks owned 731 businesses. We had $100 million
in real estate assets. So all over America, in the
presence of discrimination, Black Americans,
using the instruments of the free enterprise system,
pooled their money together in their churches'
burial societies and capitalized their own
businesses and thrived. They had Black Wall
Streets all over America. Throughout the history
of this country, Black Americans have fought
in every war in defense of the founding principles. And what we should
celebrate is their success within the context
of the system. If we're going to talk
about the legacy of slavery, we should also talk
about the legacy of resistance and
resilience, that Blacks resisted by being resilient. For instance, in 1943, there
were no Black Naval officers, so Eleanor Roosevelt, the
wife of President Roosevelt, insisted that the Navy
train Black Naval officers. The Navy selected 16
college-educated Black cadets for training. But they decided to
give these Black cadets in eight weeks what they would
give white cadets in 16 weeks. And once the Black cadets found
out what the Navy was about, they put blankets up
over their windows and stayed up all
night and studied. And when they were
tested, they all scored in the 90th percentile. Well, the Navy, believing
that they had cheated, tested them individually. The second time they scored
in the 93rd percentile. And after a few months
of hesitation, 13 of them were made officers
for the first time. To this day, the
scores of these cadets set a record at the
Academy because they have the highest score in the
history of the Naval Training Academy. Another example from history
that we're presenting is a man named
Robert Smalls, who was born in 1839 in
[INAUDIBLE] North Carolina. He was a slave
working on a ship. And one night, when his
masters he left the ship, he commandeered the ship. And along with his
five other crewmen, they sneaked out of the port,
picked up their families, and put their master's hat
on, and waved and went past five different garrison and
turned the supply ship over to the Union Navy. Robert Smalls was celebrated
throughout the country, and as a consequence
of his heroic actions, Lincoln admitted Blacks in
to fight for the Union Army. After the war, Robert Smalls
became a successful businessman and got elected to the
Congress during Reconstruction. And he went back and
purchased the plantation on which he was a slave. And because the family
of the slave master had become destitute, in
an act of radical grace, he took in the wife and
children of the slave master and even allowed her to
remain in the master bedroom, as she had become
delusional and didn't realize that the war was over. And I think that's a marvelous
story of the resilience of Black Americans to thrive
and achieve against the odds, to be born a slave, and through
the free enterprise system, earn enough money to
come back and actually purchase the plantation
of which he was a slave and exhibited the
kind of radical grace that enabled him
to take in and care for the family of
the slave master. And so we are taking
these experiences that are ignored and
overlooked by 1619 and presenting these as evidence
that America should not ever be defined by its birth
defect of slavery, but it should be defined by
the promise that it holds. And that's why people of
color from all over the world are risking their
lives to get here. And so it is important
because the message that is coming from liberal radical
leftists and the Black Lives Matter movement
is really sending a very dangerous message to
not only Blacks, but whites. And the message that
is being sent to Blacks is that they are defined by
slavery and discrimination. And therefore, if white
America doesn't change, it is difficult, impossible
for Blacks to change. That's making an assumption
that Blacks have no agency and therefore are
totally dependent. But our society
is at a crossroads right now where race is
dominating everything. Contracts between law firms now
require that companies sign on to the race grievance training. School systems are
being taught history that America is
defined by slavery. And so our culture
is being polluted by this notion that America
is defined by slavery and that it is an
exploitative nation and capitalism is
to be disavowed. The Black Lives Matter
movement promotes itself as seeking social
justice in wake of George Floyd being murdered
or killed by the police. But what they have done
is hijack the civil rights movement and migrated it
from justice for Blacks to burning Bibles in
Portland, to attempting to desecrate World
War II memorials, taking down statues not
of Southern generals, but of luminaries like
Frederick Douglass. And so there really
is a crisis in America where the radical left is using
race and America's birth defect as a bludgeon to tear
apart this nation. And so what we
believe should happen as a defense of this nation is
that the majority of low income Blacks who are suffering
the most in this turmoil that we're in, they are
also the greatest allies in the restoration
of this nation. I think there is a myth that
the so-called spokespersons for Black Americans speaks for
the everyday Black American. It's just not true. Many of those who
command the microphones and are on the talk shows
supposed to be representatives of the poor, many of these
leaders are against the police. 80% of Black Americans support
more police in communities. There's always
been a bifurcation between the interests of
so-called spokesperson and low income people. For instance, on the issue
of vouchers and choice in education, only 8% of
the so-called civil rights leadership supports vouchers. 65% to 70% of low income
Blacks support vouchers. And this is true. For instance, in Florida
the 2018 election gubernatorial election
where deSantis ran against Gillum, the liberal
Black former mayor of Tampa, the margin of victory
was 32,000 votes. And that's because
100,000 low income Blacks voted for the Republican
deSantis because of his position on
choice and vouchers in education, even though
Gillum brought into the campaign for him ex-President
Obama and Oprah Winfrey. Even with Oprah
Winfrey and Obama coming to campaign for
the Black candidate, 100,000 low income Blacks
voted the other way because they put the interests
of their children's education ahead of race. And I think that is
an opening, and you're going to see the same divide
as you take specific issues into communities. After all, many of
those who are advocating the defunding of
the police do not live in neighborhoods that
have high crime rates. Many of them live in
gated communities, and therefore they don't have
to suffer the consequences of their advocacy. What is it they're trying to do? Because they have no solutions. All they're talking about
is what they are against, what they want to abolish,
what they want to deconstruct. They offer no remedies. They are saying that the
problem of Black America is institutional racism. My challenge to them
is what does that mean? Give me an example of
institutional racism. And then I want to know what
remedy would they apply? And then how would
that remedy stop, for instance, the
hemorrhage of Black on Black death in
the inner city? How would it reduce
drug addictions among vulnerable populations
living in our inner cities? So one of the ways that
America can be restored is if we mobilize within
low income neighborhoods those people that stand to
lose the most because now what the left is saying
to Black America, that you are exempt from
any personal responsibility for control of your
life, that you can never be agents of your own uplift,
that the bourgeois values of hard work, sacrifice, delayed
gratification are somehow associated with colonialism
or white suppression. And therefore, to be
legitimately Black, you must abandon
the bourgeois values that enabled Frederick
Douglass and many of those who came before us
in the past who successfully fought against racial
discrimination and oppression by building their
own schools, building their own mental hospitals,
hotels, educational systems. So the true liberators
of this country will be those in whose name
Black Lives Matter have defamed by their actions. The Golden 13 example,
and the example of the life of Robert
Small, are just a few examples of what I
call radical grace in action, and they really exemplify
the best that is America. We must come together
and deracialize race and desegregate
poverty, and try to assist all Americans to
be the best that we can be. Thank you.
