Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look, and an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth.

For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street.

Years ago, after visiting the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C., sociologists and civil rights leader Bob Woodson, wrote about a display that he said, quote, stop me in my tracks.

The 1980s were, according to the exhibit, years of paradox.

While many blacks pursued advanced degrees and entered the professions, others existed in poor

neighborhoods filled with drugs and violence.

So who or what was to blame for this stark contrast?

Well, according to the museum, the answer was Ronald Reagan,

because he cut too many social programs. Woodson, who founded the Woodson Center in Washington, D.C.,

to, quote, empower low-income communities to solve their own problems, did not buy that take.

Is it truly institutional racism and heartless policies that resulted in the conditions today,

he asked? Well, on Wednesday, the Woodson Center announced that Robert Woodson, a recipient of the

MacArthur Genius Fellowship, a Presidential Citizens Medal, the Freedom Leadership Award from

Hillsdale College, and the 2018 William Wobberforce Award, among many other honors, had died at the age of

89. As the center wrote in their announcement, and I quote, from his early days as a civil

rights activist to his decades at the Woodson Center, Bob built a body of work that reframed how

America thinks about poverty, race, and community. He stood steadfast for the nation's founding values and virtues, including faith, hard work,

personal responsibility, the foundational importance of healthy families and communities,

and the ability of everyone to shun a victimhood mentality and become agents of their own uplift.

He's left behind a generation of leaders,

revitalized neighborhoods, and a civil rights tradition centered on the people it was always meant to

serve. He didn't just build an organization. He built relationships, and those relationships

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