A STAR WHOSE LIGHT WILL NEVER DIM
By DeWAYNE WICKHAM
Charles Robinson was never“ off the clock.”
A gumshoe journalist who launched his career on what he described as“ a white, country gospel station” where his on-air handle was“ brother Charles Robinson,” he was always in pursuit of a good story. And he never tired of the chase.
Charles cut his journalism teeth on television stations in Richmond, Virginia, West Palm Beach, Florida, and Cincinnati, Ohio, after graduating from Virginia Commonwealth University in 1980. He also did stints on Black Entertainment Television, TPT Radio Network, Sphinx magazine and WEAA-FM, before joining Maryland Public Television as a political reporter on its News & Public Affairs team in 2001.
For more than two decades Robinson covered the Maryland legislature and a long list of national political stories.“ People trusted him to be fair and to be accurate,” Travis Mitchell, Maryland Public Television’ s senior vice president and chief content officer, said of Robinson, The Baltimore Banner reported.
He was fair, accurate and persistent.
During a reporting trip to Cuba in 2014, Charles was surprised to hear a Cuban mother complain that while the country’ s government provided every family a basic, monthly ration of food – which included portions of fish and chicken – the island nation always seemed to run out of fish.
The woman said,“ chicken, no fish” was often the response people got when they tried to use their ration card to get fish from a state-run store. Hearing this, Robinson spent much of his time in Cuba subtly, but
persistently, asking officials about the shortage of Fish.
While Robinson never got a satisfactory answer, his persistence moved a high ranking official in Cuba’ s foreign ministry to say they would look into the matter. That concession resulted from the skillful“ chipping away” at politicians that Robinson honed to an art form in his coverage of the Maryland legislature.
It was also Robinson’ s quiet determination to make a difference that drew him to the hallways and classrooms of Morgan State University’ s school of Global Journalism & Communication, shortly after its creation in 2013.
From the very opening of our school, which he attended, Charles was always in the building, sharing his professional knowledge with students, and often taking them on assignment with him to the state legislature. He was the bridge
between what our students learned in the classroom and the real-life reporting assignments they were exposed when he took them to the legislature.
Robinson won a regional Emmy for his reporting on the 10th anniversary of the United Airlines Flight 93 that crashed in Shanksville, Pennsylvania during the 9 / 11 terrorist attacks on the United States.
On October 5, 2016, Robinson was honored with a star on Maryland Public Television’ s Walk of Fame.
From 2001 to 2004, he served as president of the Association of Black Media Workers, the Baltimore affiliate of the National Association of Black Journalists. Four years later, Robinson was elected to the NABJ board, where he served as director of the organization’ s Region II, which covers the states of Maryland, West Virginia, Delaware, Virginia and the District of Columbia. As I said, he was never“ off the clock.”
Charles Frederick Robinson, III, died on December 15, 2025. He was 69. n
DeWayne Wickham is the founding dean of the School of Global Journalism & Communication and a longtime friend of Charles Robinson.
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