Tell L. Robinson Sr. about his new book, Moving Forward | Books

“I decided as a young man that I didn’t like politics and never wanted to be a part of it,” Press L. Robinson Sr. writes in his latest memoir. “I also gave up on ever wanting to be a teacher or own a Cadillac.”

Ironically, 87-year-old community leader and former Southern University administrator Robinson did all three. He grew up in South Carolina and received his PhD in physical chemistry from Howard University and later became an assistant professor at Southern University.

“I wanted to be a chemist,” he said. “But I also had a Howard University classmate from New Orleans, and he was telling me, ‘Abs, man, you just need to go to Louisiana—to New Orleans.’ They have the best food in the world and the most beautiful women.”

Robinson was 25 at the time. Despite an offer to teach at Southern University, he was reluctant to go to Louisiana—it had a reputation for being discriminatory, he said, but he made a yearlong commitment to “just try these two things.”

“Nine months later I got married,” he said. “I didn’t live even a year.” He and his wife, Ruth Ann Washington, of Baton Rouge, were married for 53 years before she passed away in 2018.

His “year-long” stay in Louisiana turned out to be 60 years longer than expected. He served on the Scotlandville Neighborhood Council and helped create the Scotlandville Neighborhood Advisory Council. He eventually ran for the East Baton Rouge Parish School Board and became the first black elected member, vice president and president.

Since his retirement, he has been busy with Together Baton Rouge and Together Louisiana, working on community issues while serving as a lay leader in his church.

“You never really retire,” he said. “You’re just changing jobs.”

Robinson recently published his memoir, Onward: My Life as a Baton Rouge Community Pioneer. He will be at the Louisiana Book Festival on Saturday, November 2, for a panel entitled “Thriving Against All Odds: Personal Stories of Race, Identity, and Community,” followed by a book signing.

In the author’s note for your book, you write that you were hesitant to write the book because you felt that your life experiences were “not significant enough to interest anyone.” How has your perspective changed over the course of this book?

Judge Freddie Pitcher asked me to review his book and said, “Press, you have a story to tell, too, and you should tell it.”

I said, “Well, Freddie, I don’t know if anyone would be interested in what I did.”

Then the pandemic came and you couldn’t go anywhere. There was nothing you could do. So I’m stuck in the house.

I said to myself, “Perhaps now is the time to write down a few things I remember.” Two years of writing and two years of trying to publish it (later) and here we are. As I was writing, I still had this feeling of, “I don’t think people are really going to be interested in this.”

When I did these things, it was exactly what I thought was right in society. I wasn’t looking for any fame or anything like that. We just wanted to do it because it was the right thing to do.

Because I wrote the book based on some of the comments I received, people are interested in it because it’s history, civil rights. We hope that many different people can learn from this book.

I was really struck by your discussion of your family history in the early chapters of the book. You write that your father was a sharecropper, but he never talked to you about it. Can you talk a little about life in the story, even if you didn’t realize it at the time?

When you live and do something, you focus on just doing it day after day. For me it was getting an education. It was work in the fields. We had to do it all. But you don’t really think about it.

Why didn’t my parents ever talk about this? What happened to them? I don’t know if they were slaves. I don’t think so. I think my grandparents were, but I never met my grandparents. When I started writing this book in 2020, it was already too late. Both my parents died many years ago and I couldn’t ask them.

I didn’t even know my grandparents. My mom and dad never talked about them. They never even mentioned their names. I wondered why. I thought while writing and still think that maybe it was because they were just trying to forget. It might have hurt.

Over the years you have had many roles and worked on different things. Is there one achievement you are most proud of?

Being the student council president. I managed to change the tone of public perception of government. When I became President, we had not had a school tax since 1956, when the desegregation lawsuit was originally filed.

Because of this, the public would not support any tax, and our schools were already in terrible shape. But we didn’t have the money to do anything about it. Until 1998, when we finally passed the first school budget in a long time. We were able to turn that into a much more positive relationship between the public and the board.

What do you hope people will take away from your book?

Leaders are not born. They’re done. Anyone can become a leader. All you have to do is decide that you want to work for the benefit of your community. Get out there and start working. You don’t worry about what you’re doing, whether it’s important or not. Will it improve the community and improve the lives of those who live there?

Yes? Then you do it. People and time will show whether this is important or not.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.