Randall Robinson passed away at the age of 81 from aspiration pneumonia on the beautiful Caribbean island of St. Kitts, which he called home for two decades. He was an attorney and human rights activist best known for his support of democracy in Haiti and opposition to South African apartheid.
His daughter Khalea Ross Robinson, who provided NPR with confirmation of his passing on Sunday, said of him, “He was an incredible father.” She added, “He did a lot on behalf of people he hadn’t even met.”
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He was born in Richmond, Virginia, in 1941, and he subsequently became active in the civil rights movement.
In a 2005 interview with The Progressive Magazine, he noted, “The insult of segregation was searing and unforgettable.” He claimed to join the social justice movement was “salvaging. We all have to die, and I preferred to have just one death. It seems to me that to suffer insult without response is to die many deaths.”
The Free South Africa Movement, which started in the 1980s and fought to overthrow apartheid, had Robinson as one of its leaders. According to a statement from Robinson’s family, he headed “a range of foreign policy campaigns in his life-long advocacy in defense of democracy and justice in Africa and the Caribbean.”
In order to advance “diversity and equity in the foreign policy arena and justice for the African World,” including the African diaspora, Robinson created the Washington, D.C.-based foreign policy advocacy group TransAfrica in 1977. Up until 2001, he presided over the company as president.
He staged a sit-in outside the South African embassy to protest apartheid during his employment at TransAfrica, among other things, and he embarked on a 27-day hunger strike to urge the U.S. government to restore Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the democratically elected president of Haiti. In addition, he was a strong proponent of reparations for Black Americans.
He graduated from Harvard Law School with a J.D. and practiced civil rights law in Boston prior to creating TransAfrica and became well-known for his political activities. He published many books and taught human rights law at Penn State University.
Robinson and his wife, Hazel Ross-Robinson, departed the United States in 2001 to go to St. Kitts in the Caribbean. He reveals in one of his books that he fled the United States for a country that he thought was more tranquil and welcoming to Black people.
He told NPR in his 2004 interview, “I never believed my place was necessarily physically in America.” He continued, “I am as much a Nigerian, a Haitian, a South African, a Kittitian, a Jamaican as I am an American. There shouldn’t be these partitions between the people of the Black world. I have lived that and I have committed myself to that in everything that I’ve done throughout my life.”
The family has announced that a memorial ceremony in Washington, D.C., will take place in May, and a funeral service will be conducted in St. Kitts in April.
