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Robert Woodson
| Article
# : |
20496 |
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Section : |
LIFE
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| Issue
Date : |
5 / 1992 |
4,141 Words |
| Author
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Sally Wright
Sally Wright is a free-lance writer who lives near Bowling
Green, Ohio. A longer version of her interview with Robert
Woodson will appear in her forthcoming book Overcoming Fate:
Sagas of Self-Determination. |
The week I interviewed Bob Woodson, my parents were in Washington, D.C., on business of their own. As my mother and I walked a block from the White House in the middle of the afternoon, a man who was obviously high on something ran up behind us and grabbed her purse by the shoulder strap. My mother is seventy-eight, and he pulled her over and dragged her along the concrete, breaking her arm. Then he ran away into a crowd that didn't want to get involved.
It was almost midnight when she was finally released from the hospital, and though we found a cab, when we got to the hotel, the cab driver ripped off my father for ten bucks by folding the bills over in such a way that it looked like he'd given him the right change. Welcome to the nation's capital.
I couldn't get these events out of my mind when I went to see Bob Woodson the next day. Woodson's National Center for Neighborhood Enterprise takes up two floors in a dignified old brick building where Connecticut Avenue runs into Dupont Circle. The outer offices are a tangle of small rooms and twisting corridors. Woodson walks in fast, shakes hands, and drops into a wingback chair. I know he's seen street violence all his life, starting in Philadelphia, where he was born in 1937, so I ask him about it.
"There was a lot of crime in my neighborhood. I saw a lot of violent things when I was five and six years old. But not on my block. We had a very close-knit block, mostly working-class people. I remember my older brothers coming home chased by gangs. The men in the community would come out and sort of seal off the block to make sure things didn't get out of hand . . .
"My dad was a very hard-working man. He was always employed, even during the Depression, and he was a fighter. He was the first black truck driver to drive milk from the train to the dairy, and he literally had to fight for that job!" Woodson laughs. "My dad was a strong family man, but very tough in that environment, very tough. He always provided for us. And yeah, I was close to him, but it was more the image of what he was. We'd actually take off his shoes when he came home. I idolized him. He was not very demonstrative with us, but you felt like he was involved with what you were doing. In our neighborhood in those days, a third-grade play would have maybe seven hundred people packed into the auditorium. And even though I never saw him there, I always felt he was there 'cause he commented about it.
"I
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