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There’s a scene in the new documentary film, “Who We Are: A Chronicle of Racism in America,” where Jeffery Robinson ’81 engages with a white man in Charleston, South Carolina who is holding a Confederate flag. The man insists the Civil War wasn’t about slavery. Robinson, who was a criminal defense attorney in Seattle for 34 years, is well-practiced in dismantling that argument with the historical truth based on original source documentation including the Constitution and the secession declarations of the Confederate states.
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A Passion for Reform
Jeff Robinson ’81 worked as a Seattle criminal defense lawyer for 34 years—a span of time that, he notes, “basically coincided with the largest increase in our incarcerated population in the history of the United States. ” Now, as the newly appointed director of the ACLU’s Center for Justice, he will be tackling that metastasis head-on.
“I’m constantly telling folks, ‘Don’t take my opinion on anything.