Robin Washington grew up in Chicago in a family of black and Jewish activists during the height of the Civil Rights Movement. Participating in sit-ins and protests when he was three years old, he recalls those events fondly as “family outings.”

A nationally award-winning journalist, Washington has appeared on National Public Radio, MSNBC, Fox News, ABC News, CNN and the BBC. He was most recently the top editor of Minnesota’s Duluth News Tribune and was previously a columnist for the Boston Herald.

A 1987 Fellow in Science Broadcast Journalism at WGBH–TV Boston, his broadcast work includes “You Don’t Have to Ride Jim Crow!”—a national public television documentary that rewrote history books to tell the story of the first Freedom Ride in 1947—and the radio documentary “My Favorite Things at 50,” an audio portrait of John Coltrane’s recording of the jazz standard.

Washington’s commentaries have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, the Chicago Sun-Times, the Baltimore Sun, San Jose Mercury News and the Minneapolis Star Tribune, among many other newspapers.