The cause was complications of pneumonia, his daughter Deborah Robinson said.
Mr. Robinson became a reporter for The Times in 1950, when black faces in the newsroom were rare. He covered crime in Brooklyn, then the New York State Legislature and the contentious 1961 mayoral race between Robert F. Wagner Jr. and then state attorney general, Louis K. Lefkowitz. In 1964, he became the first black president of the Legislative Correspondents Association, a group of reporters covering New York State government.
Mr. Robinson helped to inspire the next generation of black journalists.
“There were, here and there, some black journalists with the white media,” Thomas A. Johnson, the first black reporter at Newsday and one of the first black foreign correspondents for The New York Times, wrote in an essay that appears on the Web site of the Robert C. Maynard Institute for Journalism Education. “The fact that Carl T. Rowan, Layhmond Robinson, Bob Teague, Ted Poston, Orrin Evans and some others had cleared that chasm encouraged a number of us to submit our applications to the dailies.”
In 1965, Mr. Robinson left The Times for WABC-TV in New York.
