Holocaust Education Specialist
Southern Institute for Education and Research
Plater Robinson serves as Education Director at the Southern Institute for Education and Research at Tulane University. Since 1994, Mr. Robinson has designed and implemented workshops for middle and high school teachers on the topics of the Holocaust and the history of race and civil rights. His work has been concentrated in the Deep South region of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and the Florida panhandle.
Mr. Robinson has provided training for more than 3,500 teachers in 800 schools. In addition, he has made hundreds of speaking presentations and conducted joint presentations with Holocaust survivors throughout the South. In 2008, he completed production and editing of the ten-part video documentary titled "Ten Stories of Holocaust Survivors in New Orleans."
Mr. Robinson was born in New Orleans. He was graduated from Woodberry Forest School and Washington and Lee University, both in Virginia. After teaching European history at Saint James School in western Maryland, Mr. Robinson lived for a year in Seville, Spain, where he taught European history at Columbus College. He returned home and obtained a M. A. degree in European history at Louisiana State University, writing his thesis on Hitler's role in the Spanish Civil War.
In 1987, Mr. Robinson began working as a free-lance journalist in public radio, specializing in stories connected to the 50th anniversaries of events connected to World War II. Traveling to the places where those events occurred and interviewing the people who were there fifty years earlier, Mr. Robinson produced stories (among others) on the bombing of Guernica (in the Basque country of Spain), Anschluss (the Nazi seizure of Austria), the Munich Conference (the betrayal of Czechoslovakia), Kristallnacht (the Nazi pogrom), September 1, 1939 (the beginning of the Second World War), the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, the Polish Uprising in 1944. These stories aired on National Public Radio, the Christian Science Monitor-Radio, and Pacifica Network News.
In 1990, after witnessing the emergence of Poland as a free country, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia, Mr. Robinson returned to Louisiana and reported on the rise of David Duke, the neo-Nazi and former Klansman who ran for the U. S. Senate and then for Louisiana governor.
In 1992, Mr. Robinson won National Head Liner, National Community Broadcaster, and New Orleans Press Club awards for his reporting on Duke. In 1993, he won the New Orleans Press Club award for his documentary on the Houma Indians of south Louisiana. In 1995, Mr. Robinson produced a public radio documentary on the 40th anniversary of the lynching of Emmett Till, a black youngster from Chicago who whistled at a white woman in the Mississippi Delta of 1955.
Mr. Robinson has won widespread praise for his teaching and scholarship. "As a survivor of the Holocaust from Vienna," wrote a workshop participant in Houston, "I can only pay tribute to Mr. Robinson's delivery of the subject matter. I had tears in my eyes as I listened. The descriptions are so authentic." A teacher wrote, "I came to this workshop expecting a history lesson, but I found it to be more a lesson on humanity."
In 2004, Mr. Robinson was honored by the National Council of Jewish Women with its "Dare to Care about Kids" Award. He is presently writing a book a small town in Poland.