VALDOSTA — Fighting against a force bent on racial repression has been a life-long battle for John Robinson.

The Valdosta native is currently in remission from esophageal cancer but said he has fought battles of equal enormity.

“Racism was a cancer of its own. It was equally devastating,” Robinson said.

His legal battle would draw in more than 700 people and later serve as a guiding post in the legal world.

In the 1980s, Robinson, now 55, and his family were living in South Florida.

The son of seasonal farm workers, Robinson had hoped to eventually move out of the profession and what he felt was a dead-end future.

Robinson took a job with Caulkins Indiantown Citrus Company in Martin County with a dream of moving up through the ranks.

What ensued was a 12-year legal battle that shaped his sons’ futures and altered the rest of Robinson’s life.

One red light, a speck on the map, Indiantown, Fla., became a civil-rights battleground in the 1970s and 1980s.

“It was real Jim Crow, even in the 1980s,” Robinson said.

In 1974, Robinson began working at the Caulkins feed mill plant shoveling feed. In an effort to improve his skills, he said that he began working with the mechanic cleaning up equipment.

Though officially still on the feed bin, Robinson began asking to perform maintenance repairs, rebuilding gear boxes, changing armatures, rewiring motors and welding. Then, in 1975, after several workers were fired, Robinson said he was asked to run the feed mill, but he was not given a supervisory title.

After being denied leave to tend to a sick son in 1977, Robinson quit but was quickly lured back by the promise of the title and pay of a supervisor. He went back to work but never received the pay or title, he said.

The stress of the job and the racial tensions that dominated the work environment pushed him to the breaking point, Robinson said. In 1983, he was fired for refusing to do what he felt was a deadly job involving electrical transformers.

Fed up with the treatment he and other minority workers received, Robinson filed suit.