Sowell and Woodson both knew the evils of Jim Crow laws and slavery. But they contest the ideology that the status of lower class Blacks today is due to those evils. Both recount how the period between the emancipation until around the 1960's, Blacks as a whole did much better in terms of crime, poverty, marriage, out-of-wedlock births, education, and business, in spite of the legacy of slavery and even through the Jim crow era than they have done from the 1960's until today. That is, slavery and Jim Crow did not make emancipated blacks helplessly unable to fend for themselves. It was only after the end of Jim crow and even with the great Civil Rights victories and government enforcement of Progressive egalitarian and supposedly anti-racial policies that they progressively deteriorated into the statistically inferior position of today.
They give another perspective on today's racial disparities through the lens of historical evidence as opposed to academic Progressive racial ideology and Marxist and "Woke" rhetoric.
Their explanation for what hold's back Blacks is the lack of adherence to successful cultural values and economic practices. Their prescription for lifting Blacks out of a wretched, hopeless condition is not through government, but a return to what had worked in even worse societal conditions than exist for them today.
Government can only go so far, in a free society, to make someone a personal agent for success. Government has eliminated slavery and Jim Crow. Unfortunately, it as gone so far with other "uplifting" policies that it has de facto created a new deep rooted form of slavery. Government dependents who do not own a culture of success, so are unable to to rise above a backward standard of poverty and crime. A large segment of the Black American population has lost the culture that enabled the emancipated blacks to thrive on their own merits, to succeed even during Jim Crow. A culture that was lost to them during the Progressive creation of a "Great Society."
A couple of short articles by Woodson, a Black who was at the forefront of the civil rights movement after M. L. King:
https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign...is-a-myth?rl=1
https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp?id=13387