Much of the Woodson Center's founding knowledge comes from our founder's early work with grassroots organizations in the 1970s. Philadelphia's House of Umoja was one of those groups. Now it's back, trying to make peace in a city wracked by violence and bring needed education and assistance:

"In 1968, Queen Mother Falaka Fattah attended a conference on the African concept of Umoja, meaning unity in Swahili, and started brainstorming ways to tackle gang violence in her neighborhood. A year later, when she and her late husband David Fattah learned that one of her sons was part of a gang, she invited members of that group to live with them in their home.

[1776 Unites founder] Robert L. Woodson, a civil rights activist and scholar on urban issues who published several reports on the House of Umoja, said he’s baffled that the city of Philadelphia isn’t backing the effort.

'The city developed amnesia,' he said. 'They went back to spending money on shot detectors and cameras and police and didn’t ever continue to invest in the next generation of healing agents.'" Read the full article here.

From 1776 Unites scholar Glenn Loury's Substack: "The point of a business is to deliver a necessary good or service, and thereby earn a profit. The point of a university is to educate students and produce new knowledge about the world. The point of a cultural institution is to preserve and perpetuate some significant part of the creative endeavors of humankind. When the heads of businesses, universities, and cultural institutions allow themselves to be swayed by factions within and without their organizations who believe that 'racial justice' must be prioritized above all (above profit, knowledge, or culture), they threaten the very existence of the institutions they are supposed to safeguard.

So why haven’t we seen more pushback from these leaders, a refusal to cave to the often unreasonable demands of race activists?" Glenn and fellow 1776 Unites scholar John McWhorter discuss this question and much more here.