The Community That Held Rashad Robinson Before the Campaigns Began

Long before Rashad Robinson led national fights over corporate accountability and media representation, he was a boy in Riverhead, New York, watching his community hold itself together across racial lines that did not always meet. That upbringing, he has said, sits underneath every campaign he has since built, including the arguments in his new book, “From Presence to Power: How to Take On the Fights That Matter and Win.“

Robinson’s family did not attend First Baptist Church, he said, though many relatives did, and both First Baptist and Friendship Baptist Church doubled as gathering places well beyond Sunday services, according to RiverheadLOCAL. He learned about the NAACP in school, then watched it organize in his own town. He took piano lessons from a teacher named Mrs. McElroy and came up through a “young, gifted and Black” talent program.

Support reached him from outside the Black community too. When Robinson hosted a public-access television show as a teenager, Vinny Villella, then the owner of Villella Shoes on Main Street and later Riverhead’s town supervisor, helped sponsor it. Steve and Sherry Patterson helped him secure a scholarship when he left for college. Riverhead, Robinson has said, carried “deep imbalances” and segregation, but it also held “kernels of hope and optimism and connection.”

His parents supplied the belief underneath both realities. “They believed in something better for themselves,” he said. “They built a community of friends and a life for themselves that made me believe that more was possible.”

That belief followed Robinson through five years directing advocacy work at GLAAD and thirteen years leading Color Of Change, and it continues to inform how he now advises foundations and movement organizations on building durable power. The Riverhead lessons resurfaced again this summer, when Robinson discussed the same ideas in a conversation hosted by Alicia Garza and in an appearance in San Francisco. “You don’t go fighting for things,” Robinson has said, “if you don’t see something in the world and have a belief.”