KELLEY
ROBINSON
IT TAKES
A VILLAGE
EMPOWERING COMMUNITY
TO ENSURE RIGHTS.
Written by Alan Uphold
Photographs by Paul Robinson
Critically acclaimed Los Angeles photographer, Paul Robinson, has created a 12-part series of photos and articles featuring twelve LGBTQ individuals who have used their notoriety, their celebrity, or their downright chutzpah to affect change in the LGBTQ+ community.
The series, named “Twelve Soldiers,” will feature Paul’s photographs and a profile of a different social justice warrior each month.
In addition to Paul’s incredible photos of the twelve featured soldiers, his company, NEFT Vodka will donate $1,000 to the charity of choice for each of the featured soldiers.
Are you familiar with the story of the community organizer who worked on multiple civil rights campaigns and eventually went on to become a president?
It’s a moving and inspiring tale about an idealistic Black churchgoer with roots on the South Side of Chicago who made it all the way to the halls of political power in Washington DC.
When you hear that narrative the first person that comes to mind probably isn’t the person you think it is.
This is the story of Kelley Robinson, President of the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), the largest LGBTQ+ civil rights organization in the nation.
As the first queer Black woman ever to lead the organization, Kelley has a legacy steeped in the spirit of resistance that actually started long before she was even born.
Robinson is a descendant of enslaved African peoples in Louisiana and Mississippi. Her great-grandparents escaped the post-emancipation south and migrated to the closest state to the north in which African Americans could live freely—Iowa.
Her ancestors were the very first free Black family to settle in Muscatine, Iowa. Both of her parents came from large families. Her father was one of nine children; her mother was one of seven. Despite having so many aunts and uncles, as well as more cousins than she can count, Kelley was an only child at an early age.
“We showed up for each other,
and we were committed to each other. That was what our family
and our community were all about. It was a very loving family.”
That is, until her parents divorced and her Mom remarried a man with four children.
“I went from being an only child to being a middle child, so I got the best and also the annoying traits of both,” she jokes.
Growing up on the South Side of Chicago, family was everything to her, and they instilled in her a strong sense of community.
“We showed up for each other, and we were committed to each other. That was what our family and our community were all about. It was a very loving family.”
That sense of community and commitment was especially strong at Robinson’s church. Her family attended Catholic Church where religion became an important aspect of her life.
“My family was deeply religious, and we were very active in the church. My father always used to say, ‘Church is not just a place where you go to worship. It’s a place where you go to serve.’ So the church was the place where I really grew up.”
As such, church became the place where Kelley got her first experience with serving others while doing faith organizing to engage and support people in local neighborhoods.
When it was time to leave home and head to college, Kelley chose to attend school in her neighboring state at the University of Missouri. But the atmosphere at Mizzou didn’t quite offer that same sense of belonging and commitment to support one another that she had felt in her community back in Chicago.
“I was surprised, and I guess disappointed, to discover how different the attitudes about race and culture could be just one state away from where I grew up.” she recalls. “There was an undeniable sense of insidious racism.”
Despite that, or perhaps because of that, she continued to organize, marshal, and protest on campus—fighting for the rights of both LGBTQ+ and African American students.
Eventually, Robinson decided that what she was feeling at school was just a bit too much for her, and she decided to step away from college for a while.
To support herself, she bartended and even competed in amateur Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) for a while.
“Yeah, I really did compete for a while,” she laughed. “But you know, Sharice Davids, who is a Congresswoman from Kansas, was also an MMA fighter. So I guess if you do MMA fighting in the Midwest, you might just end up in national politics, one day.”
It was during this break period that Robinson got a phone call that would cement her role as a community organizer and set her career on the trajectory on which she now finds herself.
“It was 2008, and I got a call from someone at the Obama Campaign asking me if I wanted to come help on the campaign. I walked into the office, and it was the first time in my life I saw a group of people who were pissed off about the same things that I was. And they weren’t just angry about it; they were doing something about it.”
“We always used to say that if you have something you can do alone,
that’s just a task. Big change requires you to bring other people in.”
During that same summer, it was at the Republican National Convention in 2008 that Rudy Giuliani and then Sarah Palin derided Obama’s experience as a “community organizer” with dripping sarcasm.
Robinson said, “Turns out they are the butt of the joke now because they popularized the term to the extent that now everybody knows what a community organizer is.”
Indeed, from church basements to senior centers to community centers to school boards, community organizing has always an important aspect of American democracy, woven into the fabric of daily life across the country.
As Robinson describes it, “We always used to say that if you have something you can do alone, that’s just a task. Big change requires you to bring other people in. You have to organize the community. You have to talk to people and meet them where they are and find things that you mutually care about—both broadly and deeply—and then do something about it and make change together,” she says.
“Together we have more power than we do as individuals. That’s a very powerful sentiment to me.”
Robinson’s work for the Obama campaign focused primarily on college campuses where her efforts resulted in tens of millions of new college-age students being registered to vote.
According to Kelley, working on that campaign was life altering for her as well as for many of the people who worked alongside her.
“Out of that campaign, we had somebody that ran for school board, we had somebody that did something as simple as getting a stop sign installed in their neighborhood to keep the kids safe, we had so many things both big and small that came out of the campaign that strengthened the community.”
As for her part, Robinson went on to become a grassroots organizer at Planned Parenthood of the Heartland, which served parts of Iowa and Nebraska. While there, she was an instrumental figure in the effort to allow Medicaid coverage to be added to family planning facilities.
Recognizing her successes with organizing young people, Planned Parenthood created the position of Associate Director of Youth Engagement, which Robinson held from 2011 to 2015. She went on the serve as Executive Director of Planned Parenthood Action Fund from 2015 to 2019.
During her time at Planned Parenthood, the organization saw an explosion in growth. The number of supporters on its active roles grew from 6.5 million when she started to more than 18 million today, including notably 1.5 million young people and people of color.
Planned Parenthood’s annual budget more than quadrupled during Robinson’s time there, allowing the organization to spend a record $45 million to help elect pro-choice candidates in 2020.
Even with all of those successes and with an unprecedented increase in their political power, Robinson and her colleagues warned that complacency would be a dangerous mistake.
They knew that there was a looming danger hanging over them like the sword of Damocles in the form of a Supreme Court that was becoming increasingly conservative with each newly appointed justice.
We used to say, to anyone who would listen, “The big risk here is that Roe vs. Wade could be overturned, and people thought we were being like chicken little. People thought it couldn’t happen. They thought it was settled law. They thought that since it was a right that we had had for 45 years that it couldn’t be rolled back. And then it was.”
On June 24, 2022, in a decision known as Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the U.S. Supreme Court ignored almost 50 years of legal precedence and overturned Roe v. Wade, a 1973 case that protected a woman’s right to have an abortion.
Perhaps most troubling, says Robinson, was what the justices said about other privacy laws when they issued their opinion.
Justice Thomas signaled in his opinion that other decisions such as those based on a person’s right to privacy and those based on equal protection and due process were in fact flawed decisions that should be reconsidered by the courts.
Among the laws that Thomas specifically cited were Lawrence v. Texas which protects the privacy rights of two consenting adults as well as United States v. Windsor and Obergefell v. Hodges which guarantees that marriage between two people of the same gender is a fundamental right.
She said, “Things suddenly became really clear to a lot us that when Justice Thomas said that the court should revisit Lawrence, and Windsor, and Obergefell, we could be in real danger. These are
“We can’t underestimate the rights that we’ve won
over the last 40 years that are now under attack and risk being rolled back.”
laws that fundamentally protect us in this country, and he was saying that maybe they should be reversed.”
In the wake of that ruling and with concerns about its implications, it was less than three months later that Kelley found herself as the new president of the Human Rights Campaign.
She quickly found that she was leaving one movement in crisis to become the leader of another movement in crisis.
In 2023, more than 500 anti-LGBTQ+ bills were introduced in federal, state, and local jurisdictions all across the country.
“We can’t underestimate the rights that we’ve won over the last 40 years that are now under attack and risk being rolled back.”
The unprecedented wave of legislation set a record for the most ever anti-LGBTQ+ bills introduced in a calendar year, and it prompted HRC to declare a national state of emergency for LGBTQ+ Americans.
The increase in the number of LGBTQ+ bills was accompanied by hateful, vicious anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric—in legislatures, on social media platforms, and on right-wing media outlets.
Not surprisingly, an alarming increase in hate crimes and violence against LGBTQ+ people quickly followed—especially among trans and gender non-conforming individuals.
These bills and the violence that has come with them are a focus of the Human Rights Campaign in the 2024 election cycle.
According to Robinson, “This year’s election is about whether we will be able to move forward with our goal of equality or see more of our rights rolled back. People’s lives are literally at stake.”
Drawing from Robinson’s previous successful campaigns, HRC is placing an emphasis on engaging more young people, more people of color, and more transgender and non-binary people in this important election.
HRC is mobilizing millions of equality voters, working to elect LGBTQ+ candidates up and down the ballot and working to tell the story of the Biden-Harris administration—the most pro-equality administration in US history.
Even as the Human Rights Campaign has made the 2024 election a top priority, much of that enthusiasm is coming directly from Kelley herself.
She may have been raised in a Catholic Church (where the homily is usually delivered with a calm solemnity), but when Robinson addresses a crowd, she delivers her message with an enthusiasm and vigor that rivals that of a Southern Baptist minister.
Her intensity is palpable…and infectious.
Indeed, she often encourages audience participation in her speeches with call back messages that frequently bring the audience to their feet.
Her devout hope is that this kind of enthusiasm will translate into tangible action.
“Our task at Human Rights Campaign is to make sure that all of those people that support our issues
“This year’s election is about whether we will be able to move forward with our goal
of equality or see more of our rights rolled back. People’s lives are literally at stake.”
go out and vote. We’ve identified 75 million equality voters who believe in our issues and believe in equality. We need to make sure that all of that people power turns into political power.”
Despite the long days and the grueling travel schedule that comes from being president of such a vast reaching civil rights organization, Kelley maintains that her family is the most important thing for her. She and her wife have a son who will be three years old in June.
“I think we all just try our best. I like to think that my wife and I approach each other with grace and humility and respect.”
“When I took this job, I said I didn’t just take this job; my whole family took this job. It’s a beautiful thing to know that my family is in it with me.”
Indeed, Kelley says that the reason she is doing this work in the first place is precisely because of her family.
“When Roe was overturned it was right before my son’s first birthday. There were rallies across the country where tens of thousands of people showed up. I was speaking at the rally here in Washington DC, and my son was on the stage with me on my hip. I was so glad to have him there with me because ultimately, I’m doing this work for my family, and I was proud to have him there with me. When he looks back and asks where we were at that moment in history, I’m going to be able to say that we were there…in the fight with other people who refused to give up.”
In spite of her concerns about the precarious state of LGBTQ+ rights in this country, Kelley approaches her work with a sense of hope and optimism.
“Yeah, this work is hard. We have to fight, and it’s a struggle, and we’re in the grind every day. But ultimately, our fight is rooted in joy. And our opponents can’t say that about their fight.”
“Think about that. We are the only movement where once a year, tens of millions of us all over the world show up to celebrate and rejoice in our community.”
“They are trying to deny us our rights and take something away from us, but what we are fighting for is our love and our joy.”
“They can’t take that away from us, and as a community, we should never take that for granted.”
