Robert Woodson obit

Bob Woodson, rest in peace

 

He was not on the list.

Robert L. Woodson, civil rights activist, community leader, and noted conservative author, died peacefully Wednesday at the age of 89. Woodson spent more than six decades challenging the poverty industry he believed exploited the very communities it claimed to serve. In 1981, he founded the National Center for Neighborhood Enterprise in Washington — later renamed the Woodson Center.

“Bob Woodson was more than the founder of an organization,” the Woodson Center’s statement reads. “He was a visionary and civil rights leader whose life transformed countless communities from the inside out. For more than six decades, his life’s work rested on a single, unwavering conviction: that the people closest to a problem are best positioned to solve it. That conviction shaped an entirely different way of understanding poverty, community, and the latent power of the people.”

Woodson’s philosophy put him at odds with much of the civil rights establishment. While the civil rights industry monetized grievance, Woodson rolled up his sleeves to produce results for black communities.

In February 2020, Woodson launched the center's 1776 Unites campaign to counter The 1619 Project.

Woodson was born in Philadelphia. His father died soon after and Woodson and his four siblings were raised by his mother. In 1954 he dropped out of high school to join the Air Force. While in the Air Force he passed the GED tests. After leaving the Air Force he went on to graduate from Cheyney University in 1962 with a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics and then from the University of Pennsylvania in 1965 with a Master of Social Work.

In 1977 Woodson married Ellen Hylton, and together they have raised four children: Robert Woodson Jr., Jamal Woodson, Tanya Woodson-Monestel, and Ralph Woodson. On February 8, 2003, his son, Robert L. Woodson Jr., was killed in an automobile accident. An award has been named for Woodson Jr. by the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development, where he had previously been employed.

Woodson died at his home in Silver Spring, Maryland on May 19, 2026, at the age of 89.

Woodson was involved in civil rights and community development beginning in 1962. While completing his graduate work, Woodson became active in the civil rights movement, directing and coordinating community development programs for a number of local and national organizations, including the NAACP. After resigning from the NAACP, Woodson moved to Boston, where he spent three years as a social worker with the Unitarian Services Committee.

As a director of the National Urban League, Woodson began developing a strategy to reduce crime by strengthening community institutions closest to high-crime areas. Woodson continued developing the idea of neighborhood empowerment during his time as director of the American Enterprise Institute's Neighborhood Revitalization Project in Washington, D.C. He later became an adjunct fellow at the institute, providing technical support and advice to community groups.

Woodson's strategy of neighborhood empowerment is to seek solutions to the problems of low-income communities among what he calls the social entrepreneurs that are indigenous to these communities. Rather than a poverty program directed by a government agency, Woodson's program seeks out families in these troubled neighborhoods that have prospered and persevered to learn from their success.

In 1973 Vernon Jordan, head of the Urban League, and Representative John Conyers, chair of the U.S. House subcommittee on crime in the Judiciary Committee, supported Woodson's opposition to vesting more power to Justice agencies as a solution to crime, and a better solution was focusing on neighborhood empowerment.