Bob Woodson, founder and president of the Woodson Center and author of A Pathway to American Renewal: Red, White, and Black Volume Two, joined Dan Proft on Chicago’s Morning Answer to draw a sharp distinction between what the city is doing under that label and what genuine community-based transformation actually looks like when it works.
Woodson said he believes deeply in the power of indigenous community leaders, including former offenders, to interrupt cycles of violence in ways that law enforcement alone cannot. But he said the programs being funded and celebrated by Chicago’s political class represent what he called a perversion of the approach, built on a fundamental misunderstanding of what actually produces change. The core error, he argued, is treating transformation as a transaction. You cannot pay people to be peaceful, he said. What you can do is surround young men still in destructive patterns with peers who have genuinely changed their own lives through moral and spiritual renewal, let those transformed individuals model the behavior and values worth adopting, and then, once genuine change has occurred, reward that change with real employment and job training. The city’s version of the program, in his assessment, skips the transformation entirely and goes straight to the paycheck, which produces exactly the revolving door of crime that critics have documented.
Woodson pointed to the Woodson Center’s work at Benning Terrace, a public housing development in Washington DC that had recorded fifty-three murders in a five-square-block area over two years due to warring factions. The center trained a group of five ex-offenders called the Alliance of Concerned Men, individuals with genuine moral authority and social trust among the young men involved, who brought sixteen warring factions together. No money was offered as an incentive. The appeal was moral and spiritual. Only after those young men chose to put down their guns did the center follow with employment, putting them to work cleaning up the community they had helped destroy. The result was twelve years without a single crew-related murder.
The conversation shifted to Woodson’s recent Wall Street Journal piece on Jesse Jackson Senior, which Proft described as having application far beyond Jackson’s biography or the civil rights movement. Woodson said he was a genuine supporter of Jackson during his early years, when Jackson was arguing that Black Americans could not reach the promised land by riding either the donkey or the elephant, that the path forward required moral responsibility and self-determination rather than political dependency. Jackson at that time was pro-life, describing abortion as genocide in the Black community, and was functioning in Woodson’s view as a genuine prophetic voice. The decline came when Jackson failed to follow his own counsel, climbed onto the partisan donkey, and became what Woodson called a grievance merchant whose power depended on the perpetuation of outrage rather than the achievement of solutions. Once a leader’s position requires the problem to remain unsolved, solutions become threats rather than goals, and that dynamic, Woodson said, explains the last several decades of political leadership across Chicago’s most distressed communities.
He illustrated the point with the history of Illinois’s second congressional district, represented for thirty-three years by Gus Savage, Mel Reynolds, and Jesse Jackson Junior. Two of the three were sexual predators and the third went to prison for stealing campaign funds, yet all were reelected even after their offenses became known. Woodson said the indifference to their victims, including Reynolds’s wife and children who ended up in poverty in Boston public housing, reflects the way race has been deployed as a shield against personal accountability, protecting political leaders from consequences while the low-income communities they claim to represent absorb the cost.
Proft pressed Woodson on whether the principle he identified, that leaders dependent on outrage treat solutions as threats to their power, applies across the political spectrum. Woodson said it absolutely does, and he included some of his own conservative colleagues in the critique, noting that there are voices on the right who have no more interest in the conflict resolving than their counterparts on the left because outrage sustains their platforms and their income. His response to that dynamic is what he called an appeal to people of conscience across partisan lines to turn away from grievance and toward investment in what he describes as the healing agents already present in distressed communities, grassroots leaders whose work represents genuine examples of resilience and restoration.
Woodson framed the larger crisis in terms that go well beyond race or partisan politics. Wealthy kids are committing suicide in record numbers in places like Silicon Valley. Low-income white communities in Appalachia are being hollowed out by prescription drug addiction. The leading cause of death among Black youth is homicide. He argued that all of these phenomena share a common root in the devaluation of life produced by decades of messaging that tells white children they are privileged and racist and Black children that they are victims in a country that hates them. Suicide and homicide, he said, are different sides of the same coin, and addressing either requires a moral and spiritual response that politics is structurally incapable of providing. The Woodson Center’s approach, including an animation series depicting Black Americans born into slavery who died as millionaires that has accumulated ten million downloads on YouTube, is built on the belief that people change when they are given credible images of what change looks like and what it makes possible. The goal, he said, is to strengthen the moral immune system of communities from within, the way Black communities under segregation sustained themselves through their own institutions, rather than waiting for political solutions that history suggests will not come.