For Robert Woodson, self-help begins in the neighborhood

0 Comments | Insight on the News, August 4, 1997 | by Stephen Goode

But my first written article in 1968 was in opposition to affirmative action and forced busing for integration, which put me outside the civil-rights community. When I published that, they freaked. How could you take those positions, because those are the same positions taken by the John Birch Society? I reasoned that if I liked classical music and the Birch Society does, what am I supposed to do, hate classical music, too? I have to tell the truth as I see it.

Insight: What about your own experience with racism?

RLW: I suffered personally from segregation because I used to raise civil-rights issues when I was in the military in the South. It got me jailed three times. There's nothing like being locked up in county jail in Florida where they put you next to the drunk tank.

It's hot and smelly and filthy, and you try to stay up all night so you won't have to lay down and go to sleep. You lock your arms around the bars, and then your whole standard of hygiene disintegrates as you become so weary that you just sweep away the bugs. Or you take the mattress and put it on the floor on top of the bugs, then lay on top of the steel, and try to figure out how long it's going to take them to crawl back there. Every 10 minutes you wake up, feeling there's something crawling on you.

Insight: Did it ever get to the place where the discrimination was easier to take?

RLW: Well, you know when you're that age, you always finds guys who fly with you who are white Southerners and who are cool, whom you really become friends with. It really isn't a race thing with everybody. So I got to know them and we watched each other's back all the time. It was okay. There were always mitigating circumstances. You can't generalize and say everyone was [racist], because they weren't.

I found more people who were supportive and helpful than those who were negative. But the ones who were negative, they made it really hard for you.

Insight: What did you do after the Air Force?

RLW: My high-school counselors had told me, "Do something with your hands," but I couldn't nail a nail straight! I thought I must be worthless. They said, "Do something manual." I said, "I can't do anything manual."

I quit high school and went into the military, which really gave me a lot of self-confidence. After two years of doing the things young men do in the military, running around and acting crazy, I just decided I needed to do something serious with my life.

The only way I could change was to change me. Operation Bootstrap in the military is excellent. The military is very good when it comes to taking young men like myself who didn't have much direction and providing a form of discipline.

I got my high-school equivalency. I earned credits from the University of Miami at Winter Park in the fifties when it was segregated because they paid professors to come on the base and teach.

Insight: How do you feel about American society today as a whole?

RLW: I think we're going to hell in a handbasket. But the issue can't be solved through racial reconciliation or by cutting the capital-gains tax. It's a moral and spiritual free fall that we're in and that requires a more irrational remedy. That irrational remedy is faith in God.