“Keep doing what yer doing and you’ll keep getting what you got.” Thus spoke Robert Woodson, explaining why the War on Poverty, now entering its fifth decade, has failed—and miserably so.
As a front-row spectator, Bob should know. He has been an outspoken civil rights activist since the 1960s, directed the National Urban League’s Administration of Justice division back in the 1970s, and in 1981 founded the Center for Neighborhood Enterprises, focusing on finding practical solutions for fighting poverty. He’s since been awarded a MacArthur genius fellowship, the Bradley Foundation Prize, and the President’s Citizens medal. And yet, Al Sharpton is the one with the TV show.
Which leads me to think he knows much that our media elites don’t. In his interview on this week’s RealClear Radio Hour Bob confirmed that suspicion.
The American public is “tired of the gladiatorial combat that masquerades as political discourse” and is “desperate for solutions that transcend the ideological divide,” he said. “The Civil Rights movement has abandoned the high ground on which it was founded. It has morphed into a race grievance industry. It has been hijacked by the Democratic Party. It has sold its soul to the highest bidder.”
Yet, far from being bitter, Bob is ever more committed to his work at the Center for Neighborhood Enterprises, where his focus is on studying, identifying, and amplifying success, not justifying, subsidizing, and profiting from failure. “The only thing you can learn from studying failure is how to create more of it.”
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Bill Frezza 
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