Randall Robinson
*Randall Robinson was born on this date in 1941. He was a Black activist, nationalist, and administrator.
From the Jackson Ward district of Richmond, Virginia, his parents were educators Maxie Cleveland, a high school history teacher, and Doris Robinson Griffin, a teacher and homemaker. He was educated in the public schools of Richmond, Virginia, where he and his brother Max, the first Black network television news anchor, were coached as players on the Armstrong High School basketball team. In 1959, he won a basketball scholarship to Norfolk State College, where he was politically active. He left college in his junior year and was drafted into the army.
He graduated from Virginia Union University in 1967 with a BA in sociology. He moved on to Harvard University Law School, where he joined a campus protest against Apartheid in South Africa. In 1970, he was awarded a law degree and won a Ford Foundation fellowship that allowed him to work in Tanzania. From 1972 to 1975, Robinson was the community development division director of the Roxbury Massachusetts Multi-Service Center. He then moved to Washington, D.C., as staff assistant to William L. Clay, a U.S. representative from Missouri. From 1976 to 1977, he served as a staff attorney for the Lawyer's Committee for Civil Rights.
Following a visit to South Africa, he and the Congressional Black Caucus, at a Black Leadership Conference, established an advocacy group recognizing the absence of African voices in international policymaking and the general neglect of Black countries. Thus, in 1977, TransAfrica came into existence with Robinson as its executive director and founder. He has received many awards of recognition, including the National Association of Black Journalists' Community Services Award, the Africa Future Award presented by the U.S. Committee for UNICEF; the Humanitarian Award from the Congressional Black Caucus, and another from the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Non-Violent Social Change; the Hope Award from the National Rainbow Coalition; the Drum Major for Justice Award from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference; and the Trumpet Award for International Service by the Turner Broadcasting System.
Columbia College, Delaware State College, Morehouse College, North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, Ohio Wesleyan University, the University of the District of Columbia, and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, have awarded him honorary degrees. In 1987, Robinson married Hazel Ross, a foreign policy adviser. From his first marriage to librarian Brenda Randolph, he has two children, Anikie and Jabari. Robinson has been responsible for a great effort to involve African Americans in international affairs and to keep the plight of Africa and the Caribbean before the public.
Randall Robinson died on March 24, 2023. He died in St. Kitts, the Caribbean island where he spent the last two decades of his life, of aspiration pneumonia.
