The Washington PostDemocracy Dies in Darkness

Randall Robinson, founder of influential Africa lobby, dies at 81

The founding executive director of TransAfrica was for years the foremost U.S. activist representing Africans and the African diaspora

March 28, 2023 at 12:10 p.m. EDT
Randall Robinson, right, meets with U.S. Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Coretta Scott King, the widow of civil rights leader the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., on Capitol Hill in 1986. (John Duricka/AP)
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Randall Robinson, who as founding executive director of TransAfrica, a high-profile lobbying organization in Washington, helped reshape U.S. foreign policy toward apartheid-era South Africa and once conducted a 27-day hunger strike to bring attention to the suffering of Haitian refugees, died March 24 in St. Kitts, the island in the West Indies. He was 81.

His wife, Hazel Ross-Robinson, said he died in a hospital of aspiration pneumonia.

Mr. Robinson grew up in what he described as the “domestic apartheid system” of the Jim Crow South, recalling that he had not a single White classmate until he was accepted at Harvard Law School.

He participated in the civil rights movement and, in the years that followed, sought to carry on its ideals as perhaps the foremost U.S. activist representing Africans and the African diaspora.

Mr. Robinson led TransAfrica, which also included a scholarly and educational affiliate known as TransAfrica Forum, from its incorporation in 1977 until he stepped down as executive director in 2001. TransAfrica ceased operations in 2014.

A member of Congress, he recalled, once remarked to him that before TransAfrica was founded, “there weren’t more than a few people on the Hill who could name more than three African countries.” Under Mr. Robinson’s leadership, TransAfrica became “black America’s premier foreign-policy think tank,” Washington Post columnist William Raspberry wrote in 1993.

TransAfrica had the backing of Black celebrities including singer Harry Belafonte, tennis player Arthur Ashe, actors Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis, comedians Bill Cosby and Dick Gregory, and boxer Muhammad Ali.

The organization — and Mr. Robinson in particular — was widely credited with forcing the United States to confront the apartheid regime in South Africa and push for the release of South African activists including Nelson Mandela, who was imprisoned for 27 years under apartheid.

“If I had to identify one person” in the United States “responsible for ending apartheid, it would be Randall,” then-U.S. Rep. Charles B. Rangel (D-N.Y.) told the Boston Globe.

In November 1984, Mr. Robinson was arrested, along with Del. Walter E. Fauntroy and Mary Frances Berry of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, when they staged a sit-in at the South African Embassy in Washington.

Mr. Robinson went on to lead daily demonstrations outside the embassy that led to thousands of arrests, including those of Ashe, singer Stevie Wonder, feminist leader Gloria Steinem and Sen. Lowell P. Weicker Jr., the liberal Republican from Connecticut. Mr. Robinson was detained a total of seven times.

President Ronald Reagan had advocated a conciliatory policy of “constructive engagement” with South Africa. But in September 1986, amid growing outrage among Americans over the brutality of apartheid, Congress voted to override Reagan’s veto of legislation that placed economic sanctions on South Africa.

Mandela was released in 1990 and, four years later, was elected South Africa’s first Black president. Mr. Robinson was unable to attend the inauguration, because he had only days earlier ended a nearly month-long hunger strike to draw attention to another plight: that of thousands of refugees fleeing the military junta that had ousted the democratically elected Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

“Lives were at stake,” Mr. Robinson told the Dallas Morning News at the time. “Where life is at stake, one ought to be prepared to do anything to save a life. … If there are not some principles you have that are worth dying for, then your life is not worth living.”

Mr. Robinson took only water and fruit juice during his protest, which attracted national attention. At one point he was hospitalized for severe dehydration. He ended his hunger strike after President Bill Clinton agreed to grant would-be refugees asylum hearings rather than interdicting them at sea and returning them immediately to their violence-wracked country.

Clinton said that his administration had begun reviewing its position on Haitian refugees before Mr. Robinson undertook his protest. But the president had also remarked during the fast that “I understand and respect what he’s doing. … We need to change our policy.”

Randall Maurice Robinson was born in Richmond on July 6, 1941. His father was a high school history teacher and athletic coach, and his mother, a former elementary school teacher, was a homemaker and volunteer.

His earliest memories included the indignities inflicted on people of color because of segregation — the separate drinking fountains and bathrooms, the department store clerk who forced his mother to wear a skullcap before she tried on a hat. He recalled delivering groceries at age 14 to a White family and feeling invisible as they spoke among themselves about intimate details of their life, without any sense of his presence.

“When one gets on a bus and has to sit in the back — even a 2-year-old child understands,” he told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 1987. “Life is always a mixed blessing of pain and pleasure, but there was too much pain and no justification.”

Following Army service, Mr. Robinson received a bachelor’s degree in sociology from Virginia Union University, a historically Black institution in Richmond, in 1967. He graduated from Harvard Law School in 1970 and decided not to pursue a corporate career path.

He practiced public-interest law in the Boston area before embarking on a six-month journey through Tanzania. He then worked in Washington for two congressmen, Rep. William L. Clay Sr. (D-Mo.) and Rep. Charles C. Diggs Jr. (D-Mich.), both founding members of the Congressional Black Caucus.

In the late-1970s, the caucus helped organize a working group, chaired by Mr. Robinson, that led to the creation of TransAfrica, which he said was initially formed to protest White-minority rule in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe).

During his quarter-century at the helm of the organization, Mr. Robinson spoke out against the relative paucity of U.S. foreign aid to African nations and the low number of African refugees allowed into the country.

Mr. Robinson’s marriage to Brenda Randolph ended in divorce. Survivors include his wife of 35 years, Hazel Ross-Robinson of St. Kitts; two children from his first marriage, Anike Robinson of Silver Spring, Md., and Jabari Robinson of Philadelphia; a daughter from his second marriage, Khalea Ross Robinson of Manhattan; two sisters; and three grandchildren.

Mr. Robinson’s brother, Max Robinson, the first African American news anchor on Washington television and on nightly network television news, died in 1988.

Mr. Robinson wrote several books, among them the memoir “Defending the Spirit: A Black Life in America” (1998); “The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks” (2000), in which he argued for reparations for the descendants of enslaved people; and “The Reckoning: What Blacks Owe to Each Other” (2002).

In “Quitting America” (2004), he explored his decision to leave the United States for St. Kitts, where he lived for more than two decades before his death. “I have tried to love America,” he wrote, “but America would not love the ancient, full African whole of me.”