MOVEMENTS: In Conversation with Rashad Robinson

This program is free and open to the public, but registration is required.

Rashad Robinson has spent more than twenty years at the highest levels of two of the defining movements of our time: the fight for LGBTQ rights and the fight for racial justice. He led Color of Change for nearly fourteen years, growing it from a startup into a national force, and before that ran programs at GLAAD during the fights over marriage equality and media representation.

Much of that work has turned on a question public libraries know intimately: Who decides which stories get told, and which ones quietly disappear?

Robinson has spent his career on the machinery behind that decision: the studios, the platforms, the algorithms, the boardrooms. The same question drives the record wave of book challenges now moving through schools and libraries across the country, where the titles pulled from shelves are overwhelmingly by and about Black, brown, and LGBTQ people. Banned Books Week asks what happens when a story is removed, and Robinson’s work asks the harder follow-up: Who had the power to remove it, and what would it take to take that power back?

Robinson’s new book, From Presence to Power: How to Take On the Fights That Matter&and Win (One World / Penguin Random House), is a national bestseller built on a hard distinction: Being seen is not the same as having leverage.

This program is sponsored by the Library Foundation of Buffalo & Erie County.

A paid VIP reception follows at Duende at Silo City. For details and to purchase tickets, visit BL.BuffaloLib.org/AfterParty