By james art “I decided in my youth that I didn’t like politics and I never wanted to be a part of it,” Press L. Robinson Sr. wrote. in his latest memoir. “Also, I’ve given up wanting to be a teacher or own a Cadillac.”
Ironically, the 87-year-old community leader and former Southern University administrator Robinson has done all three. He grew up in South Carolina and earned a PhD in physical chemistry from Howard University before becoming an assistant professor at Southern University.
“I wanted to be a chemist,” he said. “But I also had a classmate of mine at Howard University from New Orleans, and he was like, ‘Shut up, man, you’ve just got 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 the offer to teach at Southern, he didn’t want to go to Louisiana — they had a reputation for discrimination, he said — but he committed for a year “just to try those two things.”
“Within nine months I was married,” he said. “I didn’t even make it a year.” He and his wife, Ruth Ann Washington of Baton Rouge, were married for 53 years before she died in 2018.
His “one year” stay in Louisiana was 60 years longer than expected. He became involved with the Scotlandville Council and helped create the Scotlandville Advisory Council. He eventually ran for the East Baton Rouge Parish School Board to become the first black elected member, vice president and president.
Since retiring, he has been busy with Together Baton Rouge and Together Louisiana, working on community issues while serving as a lay leader at his church.
“You never really retire,” he said. “You’re just changing jobs.”
Robinson recently published her memoir, Pushing Forward: My Life as a Baton Rouge Community Pioneer. He will be at the Louisiana Book Festival on Saturday, Nov. 2, for a panel called “Thrive Against the Odds: Personal Stories of Race, Identity, and Community,” with a book signing to come.
In your author’s note in your book, you write that you hesitated to write the book because you felt that your life experience “wasn’t significant enough to interest anyone.” How did your perspective change in the process of publishing this book?
Judge Freddie Pitcher asked me to review his book and he said, “Press it, you have a story to tell too and you need to tell it.”
I said, “Well, Freddie, I don’t know if anybody’s going to be interested in what I’ve done.”
Then the pandemic came and you couldn’t go anywhere. There was nothing you could do. So I was stuck in the house.
I thought, “This might be a good time to just throw in a few things I remember.” Two years of writing and two years of trying to get it published (later), here we are. As I was writing, I still felt like, “I don’t think people are really going to care about this.”
When I did these things, it was just what I thought was right in the community. I wasn’t looking for fame or anything like that. We just wanted to do it because it was the right thing to do.
Since I wrote the book, based on some of the comments I’ve gotten, people are interested because it’s a story, it’s civil rights. We hope that many different kinds of people can gain lessons from the book.
I was really struck by your speculation about your family history in the early chapters of the book. You write that your father was an abuser, but he never discussed it with you. Can you talk a little bit about the experience of the story, even if you might not realize it at the moment?
When you live and do things, your concentration is on just doing it day by day. For me it was to complete my education. He was finishing his work in the fields. We had to do all this. But you don’t really think about it.
Why did my parents never 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. By the time I started writing this book in 2020, it was too late. Both my parents had died years ago and I couldn’t ask them.
I didn’t even know my grandparents. My mom and dad never talked about them. They didn’t even mention their names. I wondered why. I thought as I wrote, and still do, that maybe it’s because they’re just trying to forget. Maybe it was painful.
You’ve had many roles over the years and worked on different causes, is there an achievement you’re most proud of?
As chairman of the school board. I was able to change the tenor of the perception of the board with the public. When I became president, we hadn’t had a school maintenance tax since 1956, when desegregation was first filed.
Society wouldn’t support any taxes because of it, and our schools were already run down and in terrible shape. But we didn’t have the money to do anything about it. Until 1998, when we finally passed the first school maintenance budget in a long, long time. We were able to turn this into a much more positive relationship between the public and the board.
What do you hope people take away from your book?
Leaders are not born. They are made. Anyone can be a leader. All you have to do is decide that you want to work for your community. Get out and get to work. Don’t worry about what you’re doing, whether it’s important or not. Will it improve the community and make things better for those who live there?
yes Then you do. People and time will tell if it matters or not.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.