How Riverhead Shaped Rashad Robinson’s Earliest Lessons in Power

Rashad Robinson traces his understanding of power to a Long Island town far from the corporate boardrooms and Washington offices where he built his career. Growing up in Riverhead, New York, Robinson watched who got to make decisions and who did not, lessons he says now run through his new book, “From Presence to Power: How to Take On the Fights That Matter and Win.”

Robinson opens that book with a memory from the early 1990s. A white assistant principal at Riverhead High School selected seven Black students, promised them $15 each, and brought them to a police station for a lineup tied to a robbery investigation, without notifying their parents. Robinson was not among the seven, but he has said the episode shaped how he came to understand institutional power, according to RiverheadLOCAL, which interviewed him ahead of the book’s release.

“It is like a strategy book,” Robinson told the outlet. “But how I came to strategy is not divorced from how I grew up and from the things I learned” in Riverhead.

Robinson, a 1997 graduate of Riverhead High School, described a hometown where his family’s roots run deep. “My grandmother went to Riverhead High School when it was on Roanoke Avenue,” he said. “If anyone is truly raised and truly a product of Riverhead, it is me.” He grew up in Calverton and Baiting Hollow, attended Riley Avenue Elementary School, then Pulaski Street School once Riverhead’s four elementary schools converged in fourth grade.

Those years exposed him to two versions of the same town. “There were years throughout Riley where I would be one of one or two Black kids in my class,” Robinson said, while his family gatherings and community life ran largely Black. Moving between the two, he said, “has definitely given me a set of tools that has been important.”

Robinson went on to direct advocacy work at GLAAD, then spent 13 years leading Color Of Change, building a national profile on racial justice and corporate accountability. He carried the same instincts into a summer appearance at San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club, where he discussed the ideas behind the book at length. Readers can find exercises tied to those ideas through the book’s companion site.