Robinson, Robert Nathaniel

Impact on the world

Trained as a mechanical engineer in Cuba before immigrating to the United States, Robinson found work as one of the only Black machinists among roughly 700 workers at Ford's Detroit-area plant; when a visiting Soviet delegation studying Ford's assembly-line methods offered him a one-year contract at more than double his American wages amid the Great Depression and the era's institutionalized racism, he accepted, arriving in Stalingrad in July 1930 to work in a newly built tractor factory. He went on to earn a mechanical engineering degree at the Moscow Evening Institute of Mechanical Engineering, put forward some 50 proposals to improve tool production methods at the ball-bearing plant where he later worked, and received medals and bonuses for his engineering design contributions — professional advancement that, as he later wrote, would have been “almost impossible for a person of my race” in the United States of that era. Robinson ultimately spent 44 years in the Soviet Union, navigating Stalin's purges and the German invasion of World War II, before being granted asylum in Uganda in 1974 and eventually regaining U.S. citizenship in 1986; he recounted his extraordinary engineering career and its political complications in the 1988 autobiography Black on Red: My 44 Years Inside the Soviet Union.

Life & background

Born June 22, 1906, in Jamaica and raised largely in Cuba, Robinson immigrated to the United States and worked as a toolmaker at Ford Motor Company in Detroit before accepting a 1930 contract to work in the Soviet Union, where he remained for 44 years while completing a mechanical engineering degree and rising through Soviet industrial ranks. He returned to the United States permanently in 1986 after regaining his citizenship, published his autobiography in 1988, and died of cancer in Washington, D.C., on February 23, 1994, at age 87.

Sources

1. BlackPast.org; Christian Science Monitor; The Washington Post