Randall Robinson, a self-described “pained victim of stolen identity” raised in segregated Virginia who grew up to galvanize Americans against apartheid in South Africa and champion reparations for the descendants of slaves, died on Friday in Basseterre, on the Caribbean island of St. Kitts, where he had lived in self-imposed exile from the United States for more than two decades. He was 81….
Born into poverty in a rat-infested home without central heating, a telephone or a television set, Mr. Robinson was raised by loving parents, both teachers. He went on to win a basketball scholarship to college and to graduate from Harvard Law School. In 1978, his older brother, Max Robinson, became the first Black person to co-anchor the news on a national network, on “ABC World News Tonight.”
Mr. Robinson’s accomplishments were considerable — through sit-ins, hunger strikes and other protests as the president of the lobbying and research organization TransAfrica, as a founder of the Free South Africa Movement and on behalf of Haitian refugees. In 1984, Representative Don Edwards, a California Democrat, called him “the most effective foreign policy catalyst in recent history.”
Connect the Dots 101 
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