Eugene Robinson, Pulitzer prize winning journalist, joined Good Morning Keys on Keys Talk 96.9/102.5FM yesterday morning to talk about his association with Take Stock in Children.
Robinson has been a long-time supporter of Take Stock in Children.
He said, “I’m thrilled and a little nervous to predict what’s going to happen in three and a half years. It is difficult these days to predict what’s going to happen in the next three and a half minutes. I did not have massive war with Iran on my bingo card for this month, and that’s where we are. So this is kind of a high wire act, but I will, I’ll try to be as useful as I can, because we do need to sort of figure out where we are as a country and where we think we’re going.”
Robinson worked for the Washington Post for 45 years.
He said, “It was an amazing experience. It was a great place to work. I started in 1980 as the city hall reporter. I covered Washington’s very colorful and newsworthy Mayor Marion Barry. That was my first job at the Post. He’s memorable. In his later years he took credit for my career because he’d say Gene Robinson, I made your career. I became an editor. I became a foreign correspondent for a while in South America and in London. Did various other editing jobs. I ran the Style section, which covers arts and culture in Washington and the world for six years and then I became a columnist in 2005 and that was just a wonderful, wonderful job that I enjoyed doing for 20 years.”
Robinson was a guest for Take Stock in Children for an evening at the studios on Wednesday.
He said, “I think three and a half years from now, we will have a lot of work to do. I think a lot of institutions, government agencies, relationships between various parts of government have been upended in the last couple of years, and it’s unclear how they’re going to be put back together. I think we’re going to be doing a lot of reassembling, and as we do that, I think we’ll perhaps take a fresh look at some of the ways we were accustomed to doing things and the ways we want to do them in the future. At the same time, I think there will be massive challenges in terms of figuring out the new world order. Old alliances have been upset and in some cases, dissolved. New alliances will form, we’ll sort of figure out our relationship to our traditional European allies, to the other great powers such as China and that will be a challenge. And I also think at the same time, we’ll be dealing with technological change that could be massive. I’m talking about artificial intelligence, and the more I talk to people who are really knowledgeable about AI, the more I think that number one, none of them knows exactly how it’s going to change our lives, but all of them are convinced that indeed it will change our lives, that it is changing our lives, and that we all need to become sort of more aware of this giant leap in technology that we’re taking, frankly, whether we want to or not. One of the things that really concerns me is it’s hard to know what’s real. It’s hard to know what’s authentic as deep fake technology becomes better and more seamless, and it becomes really more difficult to tell whether is that really President Trump talking, or is that a deep fake? Is that really House Minority Leader Jeffries speaking, or is that a deep fake? It’s very, very difficult to tell. And I think that’s only going to get worse. We’re going to figure out how to deal with that.”
His book Freedom Lost, Freedom Won talks about Robinson’s family.
He said, “It begins with my great, great grandfather in Charleston, South Carolina, who was enslaved as a boy. He was sold to a plantation owner in 1829 and he was sold again to a Charleston businessman in 1848. He had learned to become a blacksmith, and in 1851, 10 years before the Civil War, he managed to purchase his own freedom. So he was a free person of color in Charleston throughout the Civil War. That was a very precarious position, but he managed to survive, and he had one son, my great grandfather, who it turned out was just the right age to be able to take advantage of the brief period of reconstruction after the Civil War, when the Union troops still occupied the South and the newly won rights of African Americans were actually protected. So he went to school. He became a lawyer. He became a big Republican Party activist and official. He had a federal job in tax collection. He did very well. He moved the family inland from Charleston to Orangeburg, which is about 70 miles away, and he built the house that I grew up in. And he was a pack rat. He saved everything. He saved all his records of financial documents, mortgages, speeches, letters, and so I had this sort of trove of documentary material. It’s kind of unusual for an African American family. Most African Americans trying to trace their ancestry run into a brick wall at 1870. That was the first census in which black Americans were fully counted. And so it’s very difficult to go back further. I had just the accidental fortune of being able to go back further, and I eventually realized that this was a way of looking at 200 years of American history through the eyes of my family, as I found out that ancestors of mine were really involved every step of the way and every sort of major and minor event in our nation’s history. Over that period, you find my ancestors and other African Americans by extension. So I was struck the entire time I was working on this book, which was about four, almost five years it took me to finish, I was struck at the central fact, which is that African American history is American history. It’s just full stop. There is no American history without African American history. And while it is a great thing that we have Black History Month, really, every month should be black history month. Without the contributions and sacrifice and participation of African Americans, this would be a very different country. Wouldn’t be the United States that we know now. It would be a very different place. It was really a gratifying thing to do. I got to know my ancestors a bit better, a whole lot better. And I guess I really felt that as a challenge. I understood that when I was growing up in Orangeburg, South Carolina, which was during Jim Crow segregation, I remember segregated schools. I remember stores that wouldn’t serve African Americans in the same part of the store where they served white customers. That all happened in my lifetime, and I now have the feeling that it was really my ancestors, almost as a group, who were challenging me in my career, who were challenging me in school, who challenged me to go as far as I possibly could, really in honor of their hard work and sacrifice.”
Take Stock in Children is so important to helping children.
Robinson said, “I was invited by Take Stock, and I have really seen the growth and development of Take Stock, of this great program, really through the hard work of my dear friend John Padget, who has been so active, really a motive force behind Take Stock for a couple of decades. I’m always just touched and inspired by this program, and it has changed the lives of more than 1,000 young people who are going on to do great things. I just couldn’t be more proud of this program and more honored to come here and speak to the Keys.”
Robinson believes the nation has a way to go as far as overcoming its racial history.
He said, “We’re not where we need to be. And if you look at that history, and I can see it close up through my ancestors, you see multiple episodes in which we made great progress on that racial history, and then we went backwards very quickly sometimes. And so it’s sometimes three steps forward, two steps back. There have been occasions when it was three steps forward, four steps back. But when you take the broadest possible view, you see how far we’ve come from the beginning to where we are now, and we also have to keep that in mind. It’s a process. It’s not a destination. The process continues, but we do make progress, and after all this work on the book and all the research and everything, I really came out feeling I had to end the book on a more optimistic note, because that’s really the way I feel. This is still a nation of great possibility and great accomplishment, we can do better but I think we will try to do better, or even if we take a roundabout route to get there, we head backwards, but let’s keep pushing forwards, and eventually we will make progress.”
What’s next for Robinson?
He said, “It’s an interesting thing, because for 45 years, I knew what I was going to do. I knew where I was going to work, and at the same time that so much is changing in the world, I now have all these possibilities, so I haven’t started on a new book project yet. I do intend to do some journalism for The Atlantic, which is really doing good things, doing a lot of great work, and I’m excited at that prospect. And beyond that, we’ll see. It’s interesting and a little scary to have this range of possibilities and to have a little time to figure out, okay, what will I do next? But I do know that I’m not done, and I will have more to do. It won’t be writing a column twice a week. I did that for 20 years, and I think that was sort of a good breaking point for that. We’ll see. I’m excited to find out, and I’ll be glad to share that with others as soon as I figure it out. I would just add congratulations and appreciation to this community, to Monroe County and the Keys and Key West for supporting Take Stock and for having supported its growth and development over this long period. It’s something really that the community should be proud of as well. And again, it’s the kind of thing that gives me hope for the future of this country, that makes me think that when you take the long view, things will get better, and it makes me very excited about what these young people will do in the future with the opportunity that Take Stock is providing them.”