Only a select few Civil Rights leaders have challenged the dominant assumptions of their era with the persistence and results-oriented focus of Bob Woodson. While many contemporaries placed their faith in expanded government programs and racial preferences to address poverty and inequality, Woodson argued that the most powerful response to racism lay in the self-reliance, enterprise, and moral agency of the people living in the neighborhoods most affected by it. A modern-day echo of Booker T. Washington, he spent more than five decades building and supporting grassroots solutions that empowered low-income communities to lift themselves up.
Robert Leon Woodson Sr. was born on April 8, 1937, in Philadelphia. His father died when he was young, leaving his mother to raise him and his siblings amid hardship. He dropped out of high school in the eleventh grade. At 17, Woodson joined the Air Force. It was there that he earned his GED
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