BATON ROUGE – Press Robinson had to show he could read, before he was allowed to become the first member of his family to vote in the 1950s. In the 1970s, he filed a trailblazing lawsuit that cleared the way for him to be the first Black person elected to the city’s school board.
It was a trajectory the son of a poor sharecropper in the Jim Crow South never envisioned was possible.
His hard work and drive was not enough. Robinson also credited his progress and that of millions of other Black people to the Voting Rights Act. The law, signed
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