Before He Studied Corporate Power, Rashad Robinson Learned It in a Riverhead Police Lineup
A white assistant principal at Riverhead High School pulled seven Black middle schoolers out of class one day in the early 1990s and sent them to the police station for a lineup, where officers paid each student $15, swapped their shirts and turned their caps backward so they could stand in for a robbery suspect. No one asked their parents.
Rashad Robinson was not one of the seven. He opens his new book with the story anyway, because the lineup taught him something about power that now shapes how he advises foundations, corporations and nonprofits confronting the same dynamic at larger scale: institutions can decide a person is available for use, and nobody has to ask first.
That memory anchors From Presence to Power: How to Take On the Fights That Matter and Win, out July 28 from One World, an imprint of Penguin Random House. Robinson, 47, built his career on a simple observation: knowing who actually holds decision-making power, and what it takes to move them, matters more than getting noticed. Riverhead is where he learned to see the gap between the two.
Reading a Room Before You’re Allowed Inside It
At Riley Avenue Elementary, Robinson was often one of one or two Black students in his class. His cousins, at other schools, moved through a different version of the same town. Family gatherings and community life ran through a largely Black world; his classroom did not. “I did have — kind of — different lives that I was leading,” he told RiverheadLOCAL in a recent interview. Learning to move between those worlds, he added, “has definitely given me a set of tools that has been important.”
Neither version of Riverhead was the whole picture, and figuring out how to hold both at once sharpened a habit Robinson has never stopped using: assume the room in front of you is not the only room that matters. That instinct, reading which room you are actually standing in and what it will and won’t allow, became the starting point of his advisory work. He has designed campaigns to change public policies, corporate practices, electoral outcomes and media representations, according to his publisher’s author biography, and each of those categories runs on a different set of rules about who can actually be moved and by what. Riverhead handed him that instinct for sorting rooms long before he had language for it.
Belief Is a Prerequisite for Leverage
Robinson’s parents spent years working to protect his footing in a town with, in his words, “deep imbalances” alongside “kernels of hope and optimism and connection.” His mother built Black History Month displays at his elementary school, labor he now sees less as devotion and more as an uncompensated tax on Black parents. “We should also live in a world where a kid’s opportunity, a kid’s prosperity is not about how much extra time their parents have or can make,” he said. What he took from watching his parents, though, was not resentment. It was proof that belief comes first. “You don’t go fighting for things if you don’t see something in the world and have a belief,” he said.
Robinson has applied that sequence at national scale, and the ALEC campaign shows the order of operations plainly. Belief came first: a conviction that voter ID laws and Stand Your Ground statutes written into model legislation by the American Legislative Exchange Council were doing specific, documented harm to Black communities. Only after that belief had spread among members did Rashad and his team convert it into pressure, pushing dozens of corporations, including Coca-Cola, Kraft Foods, McDonald’s and Amazon, to drop their financial backing of ALEC, according to Color of Change and Wikipedia’s entry on ALEC. “Our members’ efforts have successfully exposed how major corporations, through ALEC, supported discriminatory voter ID laws, ‘shoot first’ laws like the one that protected Trayvon Martin’s killer, and other policies that undermine the rights of African Americans,” Robinson said in a Color of Change statement at the time. The statement reads less like a press release and more like the belief his parents modeled decades earlier, aimed now at a trade association instead of a school district.
Presence Without Power Doesn’t Hold
Robinson’s sexuality added a second, quieter form of navigation growing up. He has said he stayed closeted through much of his adolescence, in a community with few visible examples of openly gay Black adults succeeding professionally. “I did not believe that was possible for me,” he said. Years later, watching Mondaire Jones become one of the first openly gay Black members of Congress, Robinson said he was struck by how much had shifted in a single decade.
But visibility alone, in Robinson’s framing, is not the win; it is the opening. He helped lead the #StopHateForProfit coalition, which persuaded more than 400 advertisers, from Ford to Unilever, to pause Facebook spending for a month over the platform’s handling of hate speech and disinformation. “Facebook has given advertisers no other option because of their failure, time and time again, to address the very real and the very visible problems on their platform,” Robinson told NPR in 2020. A month of paused ad dollars was presence: it got Mark Zuckerberg’s attention. Whether it produced power depended on what came after, which is why Robinson pushed the coalition’s list of specific policy demands rather than treating the pause itself as the victory.
He co-chaired the Aspen Institute’s Commission on Information Disorder the following year, examining the same platform-accountability questions at global scale rather than at one company. The pattern repeats across his work: a moment of public attention arrives, sometimes because of organizing and sometimes because of circumstance, and the harder job starts immediately after, translating that attention into a rule, a policy or a cost that outlasts the news cycle that created the opening.
The Advisor’s Chapter
Robinson served as president of Color of Change from 2011 to 2024, growing the group into the country’s largest online racial justice organization. He left in 2024 to found Rashad Robinson Advisors (RRA), where he is now founder and president, working alongside foundation leaders, nonprofit executives and corporate leaders on the questions he once answered from inside a single organization. The change in title matters less than the change in scope: instead of running one campaign at a time, he now applies the same reading of power across many at once, moving between clients the way he once moved between a mostly white classroom and a largely Black community, reading each room for what it would actually allow.
From Presence to Power translates that method into 10 working principles, aimed at readers ranging from community organizers to school board challengers to people simply trying to influence their own employers. Protest matters, Robinson told RiverheadLOCAL, but “it’s one tool.” He put it this way: “We won’t have change if people aren’t turning out and engaging. But we’re not going to have change just because people are turning out and just because people are protesting.”
The book arrives as Robinson keeps showing up in rooms where power gets discussed at national scale. In July, he joined Sen. Cory Booker, Rep. Jasmine Crockett and Congressional Black Caucus Foundation CEO Nicole Austin-Hillery on the Global Black Economic Forum stage at the ESSENCE Festival of Culture for a conversation on Black political and economic power. He launches his book tour in Manhattan on July 27 with Jane Fonda, then travels to Washington on July 28 for an event with Joy Reid, according to the book’s official site.
The book’s own pitch to readers doubles as Robinson’s clearest statement of what Riverhead taught him first and corporate boardrooms confirmed later: “Social change is the practice of making the impossible possible, and possibility is about one thing more than any other: power.” Nobody asked seven Riverhead students for permission before putting them in a lineup. Robinson has spent three decades building the kind of leverage that makes institutions ask anyway.