Marvin E. Robinson, Dallas civil rights and business leader, dies at 86

Marvin E. Robinson, who organized civil rights protests across the south in the 1960s before advocating black business leadership and equity in Dallas, has died at the age of 86.

Robinson died in his sleep at his home in Dallas on Saturday.

“Marvin was a leader in the student sit-in movement,” said Rev. Peter Johnson, another civil rights leader in Dallas. “This is an enormous loss for the civil rights movement. … The generation of Afro-American civil rights leaders is leaving this earth quickly. “

Jun. 27, 1973 – Dallas Mayor Wes Wise was presented with a copy of the Minority Business Directory on Wednesday by Marvin Robinson (right), Executive Director of the Dallas Council of the Interracial Council for Business Opportunity. Charles Cullum (left), chairman of the Dallas Chamber of Commerce, also received the directory listing 166 of over 400 minority-owned vendors surveyed by the council. Jack Stephenson (second from left), an IBM Dallas area manager on loan as a corporate advisor to the ICBO, helped. (John Young – Employee Photographer)

Born in Decatur, Ala., Robinson grew up in Gary, Indiana and attended Southern University, Louisiana’s largest historically black university in Baton Rouge, as an athlete.

He was elected President of the Student Government and helped organize sit-ins at separate lunch tables and a march on the Louisiana State Capitol in 1960. His sit-in sparked similar ones in New Orleans, leading to a 1963 US Supreme Court ruling that desegregated state restaurants.

The protests resulted in Robinson being arrested for disturbing the peace and expelled from university 28 days before graduation.

Johnson, who was a teenager in Baton Rouge at the time, said his father helped raise funds to get Robinson and several other students out of jail.

“Marvin was a great advocate of civil rights and equality,” said Billy Allen, a longtime friend. “You had absolutely no fear that Marvin wouldn’t fight to do his best. He wanted to represent the African American community to the best of his ability. “

After leaving Baton Rouge, Robinson attended Howard University law school and was a founding member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee that organized civil rights protests across the south in the 1960s. He was also field director of the Racial Equality Congress, where he continued to organize anti-segregation efforts at Jim Crow South.

Johnson and Leah Robinson-Leach, Robinson’s daughter, said he also took part in the 1961 Freedom Rides, where integrated student groups rode buses across the south to protest separate bus terminals.

“He would tell us about it, but at the end of the day he was just dad,” said Robinson-Leach.

Robinson graduated from Howard’s law school in 1968 and moved to Dallas a few years later, where he helped set up networking groups for young blacks in the city. He continued to use his leadership positions to fight systemic racism.

“He’s spent his entire life bringing people of color equality and opportunity,” said Allen. “Marvin Robinson was a role model, a mentor for me.”

In 1976, Robinson was tasked with transforming Crozier Technical High School in Dallas into the city’s Business and Management Magnet High School, where he was the only black director of such an institution. The students there wore business attire and were able to take regular coffee breaks, as they would in a company workplace.

Robinson later worked as a senior executive for Xerox Corporation with a focus on improving minority representation in the company. When he was a member of the Dallas Park Board in 1980, he led a push to overturn a Dallas flower show in Fair Park because only white members of local gardening clubs were members.

In 1983 he ran for a seat on the Dallas City Council, but lost in a runoff election. Several years later, Robinson testified in a trial about the district’s electoral system, saying he had been discriminated against as a candidate because of his race.

After leaving Xerox as vice president in 1985, he attempted a Burger King franchise, but argued that despite his successful corporate career, no bank in Dallas would give him an entrepreneurial loan.

“Banks said I was not qualified, but I was qualified to run Xerox,” Robinson told The Dallas Morning News in 1988. “They do the same thing in the country clubs.”

Robinson eventually opened the franchise and was president of a company that made concessions at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport.

Robinson-Leach said her father was very caring for his family and enjoyed traveling with his wife, Yvonne Metoyer Robinson, their three children and six grandchildren. The family regularly went on vacation to the Caribbean island of St. Martin and other international destinations. She said her father had a great personality that made everyone feel like a close friend.

Allen said he learned how to raise his own children by watching Robinson as a father.

“The way he did what he did,” Allen said. “Our children have benefited from this.”

In addition to his 62-year-old wife and daughter, Robinson leaves behind his son Marvin Robinson Jr. and one other daughter, Melissa Robinson-Chavez, and six grandchildren. A celebration of life is scheduled to take place at a later date.

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