Eugene H. Robinson, columnist and associate editor of The Washington Post, will be returning home next weekend to help South Carolina State University celebrate Founder's Day.

SCSU will celebrate the 112th anniversary of its establishment at 4 p.m. Sunday, March 2, at Smith-Hammond-Middleton Memorial Center. Robinson will deliver the keynote address.

SCSU will also announce distinguished alumni and 10, 20 and 30-year faculty and staff service award recipients, as well as 2008 inductees to the Quarter Century Club and Thomas E. Miller Society.

Robinson uses his twice-weekly column in The Washington Post to pick American society apart and then put it back together again in unexpected, and revelatory, new ways.

In a 25-year career at The Washington Post, Robinson has been city hall reporter, city editor, foreign correspondent in Buenos Aires and London, foreign editor, and assistant managing editor in charge of the paper's award-winning Style section.

He has written books about race in Brazil and music in Cuba, covered a heavyweight championship fight, witnessed riots in Philadelphia and a murder trial in the deepest Amazon and sat with presidents, dictators and the Queen of England.

Robinson was born and raised in Orangeburg and remembers the culminating years of the Civil Rights Movement - the event that came to be known as the Orangeburg Massacre took place within sight of his house. He was educated at Orangeburg High School, where he was one of a handful of black students on the previously all-white campus; and the University of Michigan, where during his senior year he was the first black student to be named co-editor-in-chief of the award-winning student newspaper, The Michigan Daily.

He began his journalism career at the San Francisco Chronicle, where he was one of two reporters assigned to cover the trial of kidnapped newspaper heiress Patricia Hearst.

Robinson joined The Washington Post in 1980 as city hall reporter, covering the first term of Washington's larger-than-life mayor, Marion Barry. For the first time since Orangeburg, race became a dominant issue in Robinson's life - as city hall reporter, he was the de facto emissary of a powerful white institution, The Post, to an ambitious, race-conscious, black-run government of a majority-black city. There he learned another important lesson: Man-in-the-middle is never a comfortable role, but sometimes it's a necessary one.

Robinson became an assistant city editor in 1981, and in 1984 was promoted to city editor, in charge of the paper's coverage of the District of Columbia. During the 1987-88 academic year, on leave from The Post, Robinson was a Nieman Fellow in Journalism at Harvard University. He began studying the Spanish language - he had always promised himself that if he ever had a year off he would learn Spanish, since that would be useful for any journalist in a nation where immigration from Latin America was already gathering steam. Study of the language quickly led to courses on Latin American literature, history and politics.

On his return to the paper, he was named The Post's South America correspondent, based in Buenos Aires, Argentina, a post he held from 1988 to 1992. The assignment allowed him to research his first book, "Coal to Cream: A Black Man's Journey Beyond Color to an Affirmation of Race," published in 1999.

For the subsequent two years, he was London bureau chief. In February 1994, Robinson returned to Washington to become The Post's foreign editor. That same year he was elected to the Council on Foreign Relations.

In January 1999, Robinson became an assistant managing editor of The Post, in charge of the Style section - where he learned that hip-hop and "American Idol" are as relevant to people's lives, in their way, as the "serious" news that gets reported on the front page. His appointment as associate editor and columnist took place Jan. 1, 2005.

Robinson is a member of the National Association of Black Journalists and has received numerous journalism awards. His second book, "Last Dance in Havana: The Final Days of Fidel and the Start of the New Cuban Revolution" -- an examination of contemporary Cuba, looking at the society through the vibrant music scene - was published in 2004.

Robinson lives in Arlington, Va., with his wife Avis and their two sons.

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