FROM PRESENCE TO POWER: BOOK DISCUSSION W/ RASHAD ROBINSON

Seating is limited to 200 guests, so register early to reserve your spot.

Why do some fights for justice hit a wall while others succeed? What does it take to win social change, especially now? It comes down to understanding one thing, the difference between presence and power.

Failing to do so is one way we got into this mess, but understanding how power really works is a big part of how we get out of it.

Rashad Robinson would know. A social change strategist, he's spent more than twenty years at the highest levels of leadership in two of the most significant social movements of our time: the fight for LGBTQ rights and the fight for racial justice. He's taken on tech giants and the criminal justice system, politicians in Washington and corporate executives in Hollywood. He's been on the front lines of protest and in the back rooms of negotiation.

Robinson argues that achieving presence, the visibility of marches, media fads, and making issues popular, is not the same as gaining the leverage required to change the rules for how society works or change the decisions that politicians, corporate executives, and other people in authority make.

This book offers a set of essential lessons about power for anyone who wants to understand it, gain it, and use it to win the progress we all deserve, and to defeat the forces trying to take our freedoms away. Robinson provides the tools needed to help everyday people build real leverage in systems designed to prevent them from doing so.

As someone who helped shape the resistance after the 2016 election, and continues to help leaders at every level find innovative ways to fight back and win progress today, Robinson offers a hopeful, practical guide to achieving positive impact in the most challenging times.

Setting the stage for the conversation is Paul Coates, founder of Black Classic Press and BCP Digital Printing, and former leader of the Baltimore chapter of the Black Panther Party. After his years organizing with the Panthers, Coates channeled that same commitment to Black self-determination into building an institution: in 1978, he founded Black Classic Press, which remains the country's only Black, union-backed book printer on the East Coast and has since printed millions of books by and about people of African descent. His own path, from movement organizing to building a lasting institution that still operates in Baltimore today, is a living example of the argument at the center of Robinson's book, that real change takes more than visibility, it takes building the power to sustain it. Coates opens the program by grounding Robinson's national argument in Baltimore's own history of organizing and institution-building.

Guiding the conversation is Michel Martin, host of NPR's Morning Edition, the network's national morning news program carried on more than 840 public radio stations. An Emmy-winning journalist with more than 25 years in newsrooms, first in print, then television, and now public radio, Martin has spent her career pressing power to account, from the halls of Congress to corporate boardrooms, while also making space for the conversations that happen in barbershops, kitchens, and living rooms across the country. She previously hosted NPR's Tell Me More and the weekend edition of All Things Considered, and created the live event series Michel Martin: Going There. Her interviewing style, a rare mix of empathy, toughness, and journalistic rigor, makes her uniquely suited to press Robinson on exactly the questions this book raises, not just what presence looks like, but what it actually takes to build power that lasts.

• Free admission, registration required
• Book signing to follow the program
• Copies of the book available to order in advance or pick up at the event

This program is made possible with support from:

• Black Classic Press
• Everyone's Place
• Baltimore Development Corporation
• Mayor's Office of Arts, Culture and Entertainment

For more information, contact [email protected]

Purchase your copy of the book and receive it at the event. You can also purchase a copy of the book at the event.