Remembering Bob Woodson: A leader of incorruptible Christian character

By Richard D. Land, Christian Post Executive Editor Friday, May 29, 2026

On May 19, a great American passed away. His name was Robert L. Woodson Sr., affectionately known to many as “Bob.”

Woodson emerged over more than four decades as an important and influential leader, not just for black Americans but for Americans of all backgrounds and ethnicities. The Christian Post has already published earlier this week an excellent tribute acknowledging and celebrating his many valuable contributions to American society, titled "Bob Woodson, black conservative movement leader, dies: Faithful perseverance in fighting poverty, racism," by Eric Wallace.  

However, just as The Wall Street Journal marked Woodson’s passing with several pieces, I believe CP should devote additional attention to his life and legacy.

It was my privilege to know Robert Woodson for more than three decades. I first met him in my role as president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, where I sought to foster racial reconciliation in our great nation. I found him to be a man of incorruptible character, indomitable courage, deep compassion, personal faith and towering intellect.

To understand Robert Woodson, you have to understand his deeply personal Christian faith. His faith shaped every area of his life.

Woodson was the founder and president of the Woodson Center, a nonprofit that supports local initiatives to strengthen low-income communities. He advised presidents, including Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, as well as congressional leaders, including Jack Kemp and Paul Ryan.

After working with the NAACP, the National Urban League and the American Enterprise Institute, Woodson increasingly came to believe that the best and most lasting answers to victimhood and prejudice would be found in self-help and local community organization.

Woodson exposed the tremendous disconnect between the policy remedies advocated by black and white elites and the ordinary black Americans they said they wanted to help. He cited a 1990s Washington Post poll that asked “whether minorities should receive racial preferences to redress past discrimination. Seventy-seven percent of black leaders said yes, while 77% of the black public said no. In 1993, the NAACP passed a resolution opposing school vouchers, even though polls at the time showed that more than 80% of black people who knew about school vouchers supported them,” according to The Wall Street Journal's opinion article, “A ‘community activist’ who listened to communities,” by Jason L. Riley. 

As Woodson explained on numerous occasions, a mindset of permanent victimhood saps dignity and hope for the future. In “The architects of American renewal,” by Robert L. Woodson Sr., he lamented the use of history as a weapon and its negative impact:

Over the past decade, American history has been weaponized to convince its people that we are irredeemably defined by our worst chapters—especially the moral darkness of slavery. Black children are increasingly taught to believe they live in a country that fundamentally thinks less of them. White children are told they are inherently guilty because they are ‘privileged oppressors.’

Woodson not only defined the problem. He suggested a solution.

Both messages produce the same outcome: a diminished sense of human value, the erosion of self-respect and collapse of social trust. A people convinced they are powerless will eventually live as though they are. The past should be a teacher, not a jailer. People don’t rise when they are taught helplessness. They are motivated to rise when they are shown examples of what is possible.

Woodson believed history offered examples of black and white people overcoming the legacy of slavery and building a reconciled future together.

During commemorations of Martin Luther King Jr. Day in 2020, Woodson reminded readers that the contemporary American left had forgotten what King stood for in the 1950s and 1960s. He reminded us that black Americans achieved remarkable things despite slavery and later rigid segregation. He cited economist Thomas Sowell’s reminder that “the poverty rate among blacks fell from 87% in 1940 to 47% by 1960,” according to the WSJ. 

Woodson was well aware, as was King, of the deep current of Christian faith in the black community from slavery onward. That faith helped black Americans endure and persevere despite oppression and violence and helped shape their vision of the future. I am reminded of the observation by my former history professor Eugene Genovese, when he was personally agnostic, that the continued flourishing of Christian faith among terribly persecuted slaves was the strongest argument he knew for the existence of God.

Woodson reminded us that in his 1963 “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” King said:

One day the South will know that when those disinherited children of God sat down at lunch counters, they were in reality standing up for what is best in the American dream and for the most sacred values in our Judeo-Christian heritage, thereby bringing our nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the founding fathers in their formulation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.

“We will reach the goal of freedom in Birmingham and all over the nation,” King wrote, “because the goal of America is freedom. Abused and scorned though we may be, our destiny is tied up with America’s destiny.

We will miss Robert Woodson. His spirit, however, lives on in the many disciples he made and in the work he left behind. I am very grateful he walked among us and bore witness to timeless truth.