Geronimo Robinson is a Harvard and University of Virginia trained- educator who is currently a Guest lecturer with the University of Cyprus Department of Inclusive Education. His lectures at UCY are on the “intersectionality of the civil rights movement, and the fight for independence and self-determination for persons with Mental Health Issues. He has published several articles in the disabilities field including an article entitled: The Impact of Race, Poverty, and Ethnicity on Services for Persons With Mental Disabilities: A Call for Cultural Competence, and another article named: Quilomboos, Black Nationalism, and Self-Determination for Persons with Intellectual Disabilities: A Psychohistorical Perspective.

Mr. Robinson is the former president of the Municipal Opera Company of Baltimore, one of a handful of American Opera companies and major American cultural institutions founded by Black Americans.

136 s Spain BraSil MoSeS & Coltrane: Africa redefined

Mr. Robinson chaired the Multicultural Special Interest Group in the late 90s and early 2000s in the American Association on Intellectual & Developmental Disabilities (AAIDD). This committee was responsible for designing and advocating for changes in how individuals with disabilities are assessed clinically so that minority groups, and particularly Black American male children, would not disproportionately be given a label of mild intellectual disability.

Mr. Robinson is the former Chair of the Diversity Committee, for the City of Alexandria Community Services Board.

Mr. Robinson is the former President of the Black Student Union at the Harvard University Graduate School of Education. While in that position in 1992, Mr. Robinson co-founded the Coalition, an umbrella organization consisting of leaders of all black organizations at Harvard University working together to collectively call for change in the treatment of women of color faculty at Harvard. The goal of the Coalition was to stop discrimination against African American female faculty at the Harvard School of Law, who at that time in 1992, were unable to become tenured professors. Due to the efforts of the Coalition and organizations around the world, Harvard University did finally change its policy, and hired more female and women of color, in particular as professors, at various schools within the University, and allowed Black women to become tenured professors at the Law school by the end of the decade.

Mr. Robinson also received a master’s degree from the University of Virginia where he studied the aesthetics of African art, with an emphasis on the sculpted figures of the Luba and Kuba tribes of the Republic of the Congo.

Mr. Robinson was invited to speak at the Mary McLeod Bethune House in Washington DC on Civil Rights Icon Victoria Grey Adams, co-founder of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, and showed

About the author s 137 excerpts of her interview in the PBS video, “Standing on my Sisters

Shoulders,” February 2007.

Mr. Robinson was also invited to join the late legendary Civil Rights leader Dr. Dorothy Height, for High Tea as she reflected on the role of women, and the National Council of Negro Women in the March on Washington in 1963. This event took place on Saturday, August 23, 2008, and was hosted at the National Council on Negro Women (NCNW) Headquarters, 633 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW Washington, DC.

In 2012, at a ceremony in Charlotte NC, Mr. Robinson was awarded the title of Fellow with the American Association on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities (AAIDD) to honor Mr. Robinson for his work in the Republic of Botswana. Mr. Robinson developed a nationwide program where his non-profit, For Those In Need, Inc., collaborated with the Department of Social Services for the Republic of Botswana, to train Case Management and Social Service staff on how to develop clinical protocols to deliver a sequence of five separate, but overlapping, phases of activity including: assessment and screening for orphans and vulnerable children OVC. The goal was to develop and implement services, and to develop and monitor a program evaluation process. The project was able to provide support for more than 20,000 children in Botswana during a five year period.

Mr. Robinson was invited to a reception at Cypriot Embassy in February 2016 by His Excellency, Ambassador Chacalli, Cyprus Ambassador to the US. The purpose of the reception was to thank myself, and the Delegation I led in 2000, for conducting workshops in April, 2000 at the University of Cyprus onsite, as well as conducting a teleconference at the University of Cyprus in April 2015.

As a member of the Fairfax County Diversity, Equity and inclusion Committee, Mr. Robinson recorded a video that is posted on the

138 s Spain BraSil MoSeS & Coltrane: Africa redefined

Fairfax County YouTube Channel on Black Men’s Health, sponsored by

the Fairfax County Department of Public Health Be Well Program.

Mr. Robinson was invited to a reception at the home of the Botswana Ambassador to the US in Potomac, MD in June 2011, celebrating a concert held by The United Congregational Church of Southern Africa Broadhurst choir at Howard University.

Mr. Robinson was an invited guest at the Madagascar Embassy, occurring in June of 1999, for a meeting with the President of the Virginia Chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness, and the Madagascar Ambassador to the US, located on Embassy Row in Northwest Washington, DC.

Mr. Robinson conducted two lectures at the Corcoran Museum in downtown Washington, DC on November 18, 2008, on the complex and intricate expression of spiritual, matriarchal and legal concepts found in the Luba and Dogon sculpted figures and mask in Central Africa.

Mr. Robinson has spent most of his adult life traveling to countries in Southern Europe, Northern Africa, the Caribbean, and South America observing the influence of the African Diaspora on the development of early human civilizations and cultures. A highlight for Mr. Robinson was being named a recipient of the Smithsonian’s list of bibliographies and journal articles on all things African. It was a compilation/list of any and all books or articles written about topics related to African history and culture generated by authors from all continents, and distributed to only 200 scholars around the world.