Who's Up, Who's Down and What's Really Going On

Eugene Robinson

Wednesday, 18 Sep 2013 at 8:00 pm – Great Hall, Memorial Union

Eugene Robinson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist, MSNBC political analyst and author of Disintegration: The Splintering of Black America. He writes a twice-weekly op-ed column on politics and culture for the Washington Post and contributes to the paper's PostPartisan blog. In his three-decade career at The Post, Robinson has been a city hall reporter, city editor, foreign correspondent in Buenos Aires and London, foreign editor and assistant managing editor in charge of the paper's award-winning Style section. He won a Pulitzer Prize for his commentary on the 2008 presidential race and Barack Obama's election as the first Black president. 2013 Chamberlin Lecture in Journalism

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Eugene Robinson began his journalism career at the San Francisco Chronicle, where he was one of two reporters assigned to cover the trial of kidnapped newspaper heiress Patricia Hearst. He has been with the Washington Post since 1980, with the exception of the 1987-88 academic year, during which he was a Nieman Fellow in Journalism at Harvard University. He has written books about race in Brazil and music in Cuba, covered a heavyweight championship fight, witnessed riots in Philadelphia and a murder trial in the deepest Amazon, sat with presidents and dictators and the Queen of England, and explored the relevance of hip-hop and American Idol in people's lives today.

Robinson was born and raised in Orangeburg, South Carolina, where he was one of a handful of black students in the previously all-white high school. He remembers the culminating years of the Civil Rights Movement. The "Orangeburg Massacre," a 1968 incident in which police fired on students protesting a segregated bowling alley and killed three unarmed young men, took place within sight of his house. Robinson earned a degree from the University of Michigan, where during his senior year he was the first black student to be named co-editor-in-chief of the award-winning student newspaper.

Cosponsored By:

• Chamberlin Lecture Fund
• Greenlee School of Journalism & Communication
• Committee on Lectures (funded by Student Government)