Randall Robinson

Randall Robinson (born July 6, 1941, Richmond, Virginia, U.S.—died March 24, 2023, Basseterre, St. Kitts and Nevis) was an American writer and political activist who founded (1977) the TransAfrica Forum (now TransAfrica), an organization established to influence U.S. policies toward Africa and the Caribbean. Robinson notably called for the United States to make reparations to African Americans for the institution of slavery. He was not the first person to call for financial reparations for African Americans. In 1969 civil rights activist James Forman, in his “Black Manifesto,” demanded that $500 million in reparations be paid to African Americans by white churches. Robinson, however, was perhaps the best-known advocate of the idea. In his book The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks (2000), he demanded compensation—not only financial payments but also meaningful social programs and other restitutive solutions—to atone for the years of slavery and for the imbalances, injustices, and discrimination that keep Blacks at a disadvantage to whites.

Robinson was born to schoolteacher parents and grew up in racially segregated Richmond under the Jim Crow system. He was awarded a basketball scholarship to Norfolk State College (now University) in 1959 but left during his junior year and was drafted into the U.S. Army. After his military service, he received a bachelor’s degree in sociology at Virginia Union University (1967) and went on to earn a Juris Doctor degree from Harvard Law School (1970). After a time in Tanzania on a Ford Foundation fellowship, he returned to the United States and worked as a legal-aid lawyer in Boston, where he also did community organizing. In 1975 Robinson moved to Washington, D.C., and founded TransAfrica there in 1977. Among the organization’s initiatives were those urging the U.S. government to stand against apartheid in South Africa and to stop supporting African and Caribbean dictatorships.

Robinson became increasingly discouraged by what he saw as the pervasiveness of racial discrimination and wrote Defending the Spirit (1998), a searing memoir that gives a vivid account of racism in contemporary America. Robinson’s next published work, The Debt, detailed his conviction that reparations be made to African Americans. In 2001 he resigned his leadership position with TransAfrica to concentrate on other endeavours, and he left the United States altogether to settle on the Caribbean island of Saint Kitts, his wife’s birthplace. He went on to write The Reckoning: What Blacks Owe to Each Other (2002), in which he criticized prominent and wealthy African Americans for not banding together to act substantively to end the poverty and crime that afflict many Black communities. He maintained that racial disharmony cannot be solved until those fundamental wrongs are addressed and righted—until “The Debt” is paid in full.

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Robinson’s book Quitting America: The Departure of a Black Man from His Native Land (2004) tells of his decision to leave the United States permanently. From the perspective of his new life on Saint Kitts, where most of the residents were of African descent, Robinson continued his critique of American society. His experience as a long-term resident in the Caribbean and his familiarity with regional issues informed his historical study of modern Haiti, An Unbroken Agony: Haiti, from Revolution to the Kidnapping of a President (2007). Robinson’s other works included the novel Makeda (2011), about an African American family in the 1950s.