Robert Woodson applies tested, anti-liberal principles to combating inner-city violence.

ROBERT WOODSON is the founder and head of the National Center for Neighborhood Enterprise (NCNE). A former civil rights activist and community organizer, he is one of the many 1960s-era liberals who was mugged by reality. In Woodson’s case, it was the reality that the civil rights movement had become a middle-class cause with little relevance to impoverished neighborhoods.

Woodson responded to the mugging by moving to the American Enterprise Institute, where he engaged in the radical step of systematically studying what works and what does not work in transforming lives in poor neighborhoods. He found that the success stories he identified almost always involved inspirational figures who were working quietly within the community, outside of the civil rights and government bureaucracies. These people fell into one of two categories: (1) those who were “in poverty but not of it,” and thus could inspire others by achieving against the odds, and (2) those “of poverty” who had been criminals and drug addicts, but whose lives had been transformed and now could inspire others as “antibodies” within the community. Woodson studied these individuals and found that the key to their personal success was usually religious faith.

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