by J. Pharoah Doss
On May 20th, 2026, a New York Times headline announced the death of Robert L. Woodson Sr., leader of the Black conservative movement, at the age of 89.
In 1981, he founded the National Center for Neighborhood Enterprise in Washington, D.C., which later became known as the Woodson Center. It emphasized grassroots empowerment rather than government-led intervention. Woodson was a religious man who saw poverty and crime as challenges that needed cultural and moral solutions, rather than just economic or racial remedies.
Woodson advised Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, and in 1990 he received the MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship.
When first-term Democratic Senator Barack Obama announced his presidential candidacy in 2007, Woodson’s previously published book, The Triumphs of Joseph: How Today’s Community Healers are Reviving Our Streets and Neighborhoods, was rereleased a few months later. The two events were unrelated, but in retrospect, they symbolized a generational divide of biblical proportions over the state and future of Black America in the twenty-first century.
On March 4, 2007, Brown Chapel A.M.E. Church hosted Obama’s first major campaign speech. This church served as the launch point for the historic Selma to Montgomery March in 1965. The remaining march participants as well as civil rights leaders were in attendance.
Obama informed the audience that his more experienced colleagues had questioned his audacity to run for president so soon; however, he got a letter of encouragement from a pastor who instructed him to inform anyone who questioned his presidential ambitions that he was a member of the Joshua generation.
In the biblical story, Moses led the enslaved Israelites out of Egypt, but he died before they reached their destination. Moses’ successor, Joshua, led the people into the “promised land.” Obama referred to the Selma to Montgomery March participants as the “Moses generation” and stated, “Like Moses, they challenged Pharaoh and the powers that said some would be at the top while others remained at the bottom. “ Obama thanked the Moses generation but reminded them that they did not reach their destination. That task would fall to the Joshua generation.
Obama indicated that civil rights and social justice still required ongoing battles. He said the Moses generation took us 90 percent of the way, but the Joshua generation must take us the remaining 10 percent.
Obama’s speech was praised, but it had two flaws. First, the Joshua generation’s 10 percent goal was more insurmountable than the 90 percent, and second, the Exodus story was the wrong biblical analogy.
Following the speech, no one asked Obama the obvious question: If 90 percent of civil rights battles have been won, what are the remaining 10 percent? Whatever the answer, those battles are minuscule compared to abolishing slavery, ending segregation, and enacting the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
The idea that the Joshua generation’s mission in the twenty-first century was to remove all traces of historical racism and equalize all current racial disparities was a misguided pursuit of perfection. The inability to achieve a perfect civil rights scorecard would only lead to the conclusion that America had not progressed beyond Jim Crow and that “anti-Blackness” had worsened, which is why the Exodus account was the incorrect biblical analogy. Moses and Joshua fled Egypt to another nation, and in 2024 the following headlines appeared: Tired of Racism, Black Americans Try Life in Africa, and Black Americans are encouraged to leave the United States to avoid racism.
If Obama’s campaign team, who wrote the “Joshua Generation” speech, knew more about Black history than the Old Testament, they would have recognized that the Exodus story was applicable in the nineteenth century but not in the twenty-first.
Martin R. Delany and Frederick Douglass were the two most prominent Black abolitionists in the 1840s, but their views on the future of Black people once slavery was abolished differed. Delany proposed that Black emigration to Africa was the sole path to prosperity, but Douglass thought Black people should remain in the only homeland they knew. Douglass believed that Black people could thrive in America through education, economic development, and political participation.
In 1847, with the assistance of the American Colonization Society, “free people of color” from the United States immigrated to Africa and established the sovereign nation of Liberia, which translates as “the land of the free.”
Delany’s emigration plan was the Exodus story, and the Black Americans who established Liberia were the actual “Joshua Generation.” Douglass’ plan, on the other hand, had nothing to do with Moses, Joshua, or promised lands; it was similar to the biblical story of Joseph, which Woodson’s book was about.
Joseph was sold into slavery by his brothers, transported to a foreign land (Egypt), and subjected to several injustices, yet he persevered, developed his multiple skill sets, saved Egypt from famine, and rose to become one of the most powerful men in government. Joseph finally moved his entire family to Egypt.
The biblical account concluded: In time, Joseph and his brothers died, ending that entire generation. But their descendants had many children and grandchildren. In fact, they multiplied so greatly that they became extremely powerful and filled the land.
Robert L. Woodson Sr. committed the latter years of his life to the difficult task of helping Black Americans realize that they were never the Exodus-seeking “Joshua generation” but rather the self-developing “generation after Joseph.” Woodson once stated, “People are inspired to improve when they are presented with victories that are possible, not injuries to be avoided.”
Hopefully, the generation after Woodson will continue to build on his legacy.
